The Design of the Fifth Answer Set Programming Competition

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming that has been developed in the field of logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning. Advances in ASP solving technology are customarily assessed in competition events, as it happens for other closely-related problem-solving technologies like SAT/SMT, QBF, Planning and Scheduling. ASP Competitions are (usually) biennial events; however, the Fifth ASP Competition departs from tradition, in order to join the FLoC Olympic Games at the Vienna Summer of Logic 2014, which is expected to be the largest event in the history of logic. This edition of the ASP Competition series is jointly organized by the University of Calabria (Italy), the Aalto University (Finland), and the University of Genova (Italy), and is affiliated with the 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2014). It features a completely re-designed setup, with novelties involving the design of tracks, the scoring schema, and the adherence to a fixed modeling language in order to push the adoption of the ASP-Core-2 standard. Benchmark domains are taken from past editions, and best system packages submitted in 2013 are compared with new versions and solvers. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

A System for Interactive Query Answering with Answer Set Programming

Reactive answer set programming has paved the way for incorporating online information into operative solving processes. Although this technology was originally devised for dealing with data streams in dynamic environments, like assisted living and cognitive robotics, it can likewise be used to incorporate facts, rules, or queries provided by a user. As a result, we present the design and implementation of a system for interactive query answering with reactive answer set programming. Our system quontroller is based on the reactive solver oclingo and implemented as a dedicated front-end. We describe its functionality and implementation, and we illustrate its features by some selected use cases.

Aspartame: Solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems with Answer Set Programming

Encoding finite linear CSPs as Boolean formulas and solving them by using modern SAT solvers has proven to be highly effective, as exemplified by the award-winning sugar system. We here develop an alternative approach based on ASP. This allows us to use first-order encodings providing us with a high degree of flexibility for easy experimentation with different implementations. The resulting system aspartame re-uses parts of sugar for parsing and normalizing CSPs. The obtained set of facts is then combined with an ASP encoding that can be grounded and solved by off-the-shelf ASP systems. We establish the competitiveness of our approach by empirically contrasting aspartame and sugar.

Answer Set Programming for Stream Reasoning

The advance of Internet and Sensor technology has brought about new challenges evoked by the emergence of continuous data streams. Beyond rapid data processing, application areas like ambient assisted living, robotics, or dynamic scheduling involve complex reasoning tasks. We address such scenarios and elaborate upon approaches to knowledge-intense stream reasoning, based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). While traditional ASP methods are devised for singular problem solving, we develop new techniques to formulate and process problems dealing with emerging as well as expiring data in a seamless way.

Multi-threaded ASP Solving with clasp

We present the new multi-threaded version of the state-of-the-art answer set solver clasp. We detail its component and communication architecture and illustrate how they support the principal functionalities of clasp. Also, we provide some insights into the data representation used for different constraint types handled by clasp. All this is accompanied by an extensive experimental analysis of the major features related to multi-threading in clasp.

aspcud: A Linux Package Configuration Tool Based on Answer Set Programming

We present the Linux package configuration tool aspcud based on Answer Set Programming. In particular, we detail aspcud's preprocessor turning a CUDF specification into a set of logical facts.

Complex Optimization in Answer Set Programming

Preference handling and optimization are indispensable means for addressing non-trivial applications in Answer Set Programming (ASP). However, their implementation becomes difficult whenever they bring about a significant increase in computational complexity. As a consequence, existing ASP systems do not offer complex optimization capacities, supporting, for instance, inclusion-based minimization or Pareto efficiency. Rather, such complex criteria are typically addressed by resorting to dedicated modeling techniques, like saturation. Unlike the ease of common ASP modeling, however, these techniques are rather involved and hardly usable by ASP laymen. We address this problem by developing a general implementation technique by means of meta-programming, thus reusing existing ASP systems to capture various forms of qualitative preferences among answer sets. In this way, complex preferences and optimization capacities become readily available for ASP applications.

On Elementary Loops of Logic Programs

Using the notion of an elementary loop, Gebser and Schaub refined the theorem on loop formulas due to Lin and Zhao by considering loop formulas of elementary loops only. In this article, we reformulate their definition of an elementary loop, extend it to disjunctive programs, and study several properties of elementary loops, including how maximal elementary loops are related to minimal unfounded sets. The results provide useful insights into the stable model semantics in terms of elementary loops. For a nondisjunctive program, using a graph-theoretic characterization of an elementary loop, we show that the problem of recognizing an elementary loop is tractable. On the other hand, we show that the corresponding problem is {\sf coNP}-complete for a disjunctive program. Based on the notion of an elementary loop, we present the class of Head-Elementary-loop-Free (HEF) programs, which strictly generalizes the class of Head-Cycle-Free (HCF) programs due to Ben-Eliyahu and Dechter. Like an HCF program, an HEF program can be turned into an equivalent nondisjunctive program in polynomial time by shifting head atoms into the body.

Heuristics in Conflict Resolution

Modern solvers for Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) and Answer Set Programming (ASP) are based on sophisticated Boolean constraint solving techniques. In both areas, conflict-driven learning and related techniques constitute key features whose application is enabled by conflict analysis. Although various conflict analysis schemes have been proposed, implemented, and studied both theoretically and practically in the SAT area, the heuristic aspects involved in conflict analysis have not yet received much attention. Assuming a fixed conflict analysis scheme, we address the open question of how to identify "good'' reasons for conflicts, and we investigate several heuristics for conflict analysis in ASP solving. To our knowledge, a systematic study like ours has not yet been performed in the SAT area, thus, it might be beneficial for both the field of ASP as well as the one of SAT solving.