  We consider here Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas interpreted over
\emph{finite} traces. We denote this logic by LTLf. The existing approach for
LTLf satisfiability checking is based on a reduction to standard LTL
satisfiability checking. We describe here a novel direct approach to LTLf
satisfiability checking, where we take advantage of the difference in the
semantics between LTL and LTLf. While LTL satisfiability checking requires
finding a \emph{fair cycle} in an appropriate transition system, here we need
to search only for a finite trace. This enables us to introduce specialized
heuristics, where we also exploit recent progress in Boolean SAT solving. We
have implemented our approach in a prototype tool and experiments show that our
approach outperforms existing approaches.
