A pragmatic programmer’s guide to answer set programming

2013

Answer Set Programming is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming in close relationship with other declarative formalisms such as SAT Modulo Theories, Constraint Handling Rules, PDDL and many others. Since its first informal editions, ASP systems are compared in the nowadays customary ASP Competition. The fourth ASP Competition, held in 2012/2013, is the sequel to previous editions and it was jointly organized by University of Calabria (Italy) and the Vienna University of Technology (Austria). Participants competed on a selected collection of benchmark problems, taken from a variety of research areas and real world applications. The Competition featured two tracks: the Model& Solve Track, held on an open problem encoding, on an open language basis, and open to any kind of system based on a declarative specification paradigm; and the System Track, held on the basis of fixed, public problem encodings, written in a standard ASP language.

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2018

Answer set programming (ASP) is a prominent knowledge representation and reasoning paradigm that found both industrial and scientific applications. The success of ASP is due to the combination of two factors: a rich modeling language and the availability of efficient ASP implementations. In this paper we trace the history of ASP systems, describing the key evaluation techniques and their implementation in actual tools.

Journal of Logic and Computation, 2015

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a logic programming, declarative, paradigm that was introduced in the late 1990s, based on the answer set semantics of logic programs proposed by Gelfond and Lifschitz a decade earlier. To date, ASP has been applied to a variety of domains and demonstrated its suitability for solving reasoning tasks such as knowledge-intensive tasks and combinatorial search problems. One direction of ASP research focuses on the development of efficient methods for computing answer sets. Novel techniques were initially adapted from SAT, then designed on purpose for ASP, e.g. to deal with specific ASP constructs, like aggregates, or to solve different reasoning tasks, such as cautious reasoning. More recently, ideas have been derived from the study of the relationship between ASP and other computing paradigms, such as constraint satisfaction, quantified Boolean formulas, first-order logic, pseudo-Boolean solvers, theorem provers, description logics, and external means of computation. The goal of this direction is to be able to cope more efficiently with practical problems, and to extend the domains that can be modeled and solved via ASP and its extensions. A recent, successful direction is CASP, which integrates ASP and constraint programming to solve problems with mixed discrete-continuous dynamics. The Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP) series of workshops aims at fostering the cross-fertilization between ASP and other approaches by providing a venue for discussing advances in theory, solving techniques, and applications. Furthermore, the workshop encourages research that crosses the boundaries of ASP in other original directions, including action languages, probabilistic reasoning and machine learning, multi-agent and multi-context systems, argumentation frameworks and modularity. The ASPOCP workshop series has been held annually since its first edition in 2008 as a co-located event with the International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP). The workshop has become an established event, as demonstrated by the considerable number of submissions and participants at each edition. The eighth edition of the workshop (ASPOCP 2015 1) was held in Cork, Ireland, on August 31st, 2015, as an affiliated event of the 31st ICLP meeting, which was part of "The Year of George Boole." Eleven papers were presented and the authors were invited to submit extended versions to be con

The work aims at extending Answer Set Programming (ASP) with the possibility of quickly introducing new predefined constructs and to deal with compound data structures: we show how ASP can be extended with 'template' predicate's definitions. We present language syntax and give its operational semantics. We show that the theory supporting our ASP extension is sound, and that program encodings are evaluated as efficiently as ASP programs. Examples show how the extended language increases declarativity, readability, compactness of program encodings and code reusability. 1 .

Journal of Logic and Computation, 2009

Answer Set Programming (ASP), referred to also as Disjunctive Logic Programming under the stable model semantics (DLP), is a powerful formalism for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. ASP has been the subject of intensive research studies, and, also thanks to the availability of some efficient ASP systems, has recently gained quite some popularity and is applied also in relevant industrial projects. The Italian logic programming community has been very active in this area, some ASP results achieved in Italy are widely recognized as milestones on the road to the current state of the art. After a formal definition of ASP, this chapter surveys the main contribution given by the Italian community to the ASP field in the last 25 years.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established declarative problem solving paradigm which became widely used in AI and recognized as a powerful tool for knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR), especially for its high expressiveness and the ability to deal also with incomplete knowledge.

Citeseer

2009

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative problem solving paradigm, rooted in Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, which has been gaining increasing attention during the last years. This article is a gentle introduction to the subject; it starts with motivation and follows the historical development of the challenge of defining a semantics for logic programs with negation. It looks into positive programs over stratified programs to arbitrary programs, and then proceeds to extensions with two kinds of negation (named weak and strong negation), and disjunction in rule heads. The second part then considers the ASP paradigm itself, and describes the basic idea. It shows some programming techniques and briefly overviews Answer Set solvers. The third part is devoted to ASP in the context of the Semantic Web, presenting some formalisms and mentioning some applications in this area. The article concludes with issues of current and future ASP research. This is an updated version of the paper (with corrections) that appeared in the

2016

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a logic programming, declarative, paradigm that was introduced in the late 1990s, based on the answer set semantics of logic programs proposed by Gelfond and Lifschitz a decade earlier. To date, ASP has been applied to a variety of domains and demonstrated its suitability for solving reasoning tasks such as knowledge-intensive tasks and combinatorial search problems. One direction of ASP research focuses on the development of efficient methods for computing answer sets. Novel techniques were initially adapted from SAT, then designed on purpose for ASP, e.g. to deal with specific ASP constructs, like aggregates, or to solve different reasoning tasks, such as cautious reasoning. More recently, ideas have been derived from the study of the relationship between ASP and other computing paradigms, such as constraint satisfaction, quantified Boolean formulas, first-order logic, pseudo-Boolean solvers, theorem provers, description logics, and external means of computation. The goal of this direction is to be able to cope more efficiently with practical problems, and to extend the domains that can be modeled and solved via ASP and its extensions. A recent, successful direction is CASP, which integrates ASP and constraint programming to solve problems with mixed discrete-continuous dynamics. The Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP) series of workshops aims at fostering the cross-fertilization between ASP and other approaches by providing a venue for discussing advances in theory, solving techniques, and applications. Furthermore, the workshop encourages research that crosses the boundaries of ASP in other original directions, including action languages, probabilistic reasoning and machine learning, multi-agent and multi-context systems, argumentation frameworks and modularity. The ASPOCP workshop series has been held annually since its first edition in 2008 as a co-located event with the International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP). The workshop has become an established event, as demonstrated by the considerable number of submissions and participants at each edition. The eighth edition of the workshop (ASPOCP 2015 1) was held in Cork, Ireland, on August 31st, 2015, as an affiliated event of the 31st ICLP meeting, which was part of "The Year of George Boole." Eleven papers were presented and the authors were invited to submit extended versions to be con

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming that has been developed in the field of logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. Advances in ASP solving technology are customarily assessed in competition events, as it happens for other closely related problem solving areas such as Boolean Satisfiability, Satisfiability Modulo Theories, Quantified Boolean Formulas, Planning, etc. This paper reports about the fifth edition of the ASP Competition by covering all aspects of the event, ranging from the new design of the competition to an in-depth analysis of the results. The paper comprises also additional analyses that were conceived for measuring the progress of the state of the art, as well as for studying aspects orthogonal to solving technology, such as the effects of modeling. A detailed picture of the progress of the state of the art in ASP solving is drawn, and the ASP Competition is located in the spectrum of related events.