SMT (Satisfiability Modulo Theories) solving is a technology for the fully automated solution of logical formulas. SMT solvers can be used as general-purpose off-the-shelf tools. Due to their impressive efficiency,  they are nowadays frequently used in a wide variety of applications.  A typical application encodes real-world problems as logical formulas, whose solutions can be decoded to solutions of the real-world problem.

Besides its unquestionable practical impact, SMT solving has another great merit: it inspired truly elegant ideas, which do not only enable the construction of efficient software tools, but provide also interesting theoretical insights.In this talk we give an introduction to the mechanisms of SAT and SMT solving, discuss some interesting ideas behind recent developments, and illustrate the usage of SMT solvers on a few application examples.