Abstract
Answer Set Programming (ASP) under the stable model semantics supports various language constructs which can be used to express the same realities in syntactically different, but semantically equivalent ways. However, these equivalent programs may not perform equally well. This is because performance depends on the underlying solver implementations that may treat different language constructs differently. As performance is very important for the successful application of ASP in real-life domains, knowledge about the mutual interchangeability and performance of ASP language constructs is crucial for knowledge engineers. In this article, we present an investigation on how the usage of different language constructs affects the performance of state-of-the-art solvers and grounders on benchmark problems from the ASP competition. Hereby, we focus on constructs used to express disjunction or choice, classical negation, and various aggregate functions. Some interesting effects of language constructs on solving performance are revealed.
This article summarizes the key findings of Richard Taupe’s master’s thesis [21]. Erich Teppan provided the idea for the topic and supervised the thesis. Both authors contributed equally to this paper.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
To distinguish predicates with the same symbol but different arities, identifiers like p / n can be used.
- 4.
Please find datasets and additional information at https://www.mat.unical.it/aspcomp2013 and https://www.mat.unical.it/aspcomp2014.
- 5.
Encodings can be downloaded from http://isbi.aau.at/hint/misc.
- 6.
Please find more information about head-cycles in [16].
- 7.
References
Balduccini, M.: Industrial-size scheduling with ASP+CP. In: Delgrande, J.P., Faber, W. (eds.) LPNMR 2011. LNCS, vol. 6645, pp. 284–296. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Brewka, G., Eiter, T., Truszczyński, M.: Answer set programming at a glance. Commun. ACM 54(12), 92–103 (2011)
Buddenhagen, M., Lierler, Y.: Performance tuning in answer set programming. In: Calimeri, F., Ianni, G., Truszczynski, M. (eds.) LPNMR 2015. LNCS, vol. 9345, pp. 186–198. Springer, Heidelberg (2015)
Calimeri, F., Faber, W., Gebser, M., Ianni, G., Kaminski, R., Krennwallner, T., Leone, N., Ricca, F., Schaub, T.: ASP-Core-2 input language format. Technical report, ASP Standardization Working Group, version 2.03b, December 2012
Dal Palù, A., Dovier, A., Pontelli, E., Rossi, G.: GASP: answer set programming with lazy grounding. Fundam. Informaticae 6(3), 297–322 (2009)
Eiter, T., Fink, M., Tompits, H., Woltran, S.: Simplifying logic programs under uniform and strong equivalence. In: Lifschitz, V., Niemelä, I. (eds.) LPNMR 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2923, pp. 87–99. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Eiter, T., Ianni, G., Krennwallner, T.: Answer set programming: a primer. In: Tessaris, S., Franconi, E., Eiter, T., Gutierrez, C., Handschuh, S., Rousset, M.-C., Schmidt, R.A. (eds.) Reasoning Web. LNCS, vol. 5689, pp. 40–110. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Gebser, M., Kaminski, R., Kaufmann, B., Schaub, T.: Answer Set Solving in Practice. Synthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Morgan and Claypool Publishers, San Rafael (2012)
Gebser, M., Kaminski, R., Kaufmann, B., Schaub, T., Schneider, M.T., Ziller, S.: A portfolio solver for answer set programming: preliminary report. In: Delgrande, J.P., Faber, W. (eds.) LPNMR 2011. LNCS, vol. 6645, pp. 352–357. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Gebser, M., Kaminski, R., Schaub, T.: Complex optimization in answer set programming. Theory Pract. Logic Program. 11, 821–839 (2011)
Gebser, M., Kaufmann, B., Schaub, T.: Conflict-driven answer set solving: from theory to practice. Artif. Intell. 187–188, 52–89 (2012)
Gebser, M., Kaminski, R., Kaufmann, B., Ostrowski, M., Schaub, T., Thiele, S.: Engineering an incremental ASP solver. In: Garcia de la Banda, M., Pontelli, E. (eds.) ICLP 2008. LNCS, vol. 5366, pp. 190–205. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Gelfond, M., Lifschitz, V.: The stable model semantics for logic programming. In: Kowalski, R., Bowen, K. (eds.) Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference and Symposium of Logic Programming (ICLP 1988), pp. 1070–1080. MIT Press, Cambridge (1988)
Gelfond, M., Lifschitz, V.: Classical negation in logic programs and disjunctive databases. New Gener. Comput. 9(3–4), 365–385 (1991)
Järvisalo, M., Oikarinen, E.: Extended ASP tableaux and rule redundancy in normal logic programs. In: Dahl, V., Niemelä, I. (eds.) ICLP 2007. LNCS, vol. 4670, pp. 134–148. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Leone, N., Pfeifer, G., Faber, W., Eiter, T., Gottlob, G., Perri, S., Scarcello, F.: The DLV system for knowledge representation and reasoning. ACM Trans. Comput. Logic 7(3), 499–562 (2006)
Lewis, M.D.T., Schubert, T., Becker, B.W.: Speedup techniques utilized in modern SAT solvers. In: Bacchus, F., Walsh, T. (eds.) SAT 2005. LNCS, vol. 3569, pp. 437–443. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Morak, M., Woltran, S.: Preprocessing of complex non-ground rules in answer set programming. In: Dovier, A., Costa, V.S. (eds.) Technical Communications of the 28th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP’12). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), vol. 17, pp. 247–258. Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, Dagstuhl, Germany (2012)
Syrjänen, T.: Cardinality constraint programs. In: Alferes, J.J., Leite, J. (eds.) JELIA 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3229, pp. 187–199. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Syrjaenen, T.: Logic programming and cardinality constraints: theory and practice. Ph.D. thesis, Helsinki University of Technology (2009)
Taupe, R.: Einfluss von Sprachkonstrukten auf die Lösbarkeit von Answer-Set-Programmen: Eine empirische Untersuchung aktueller ASP-Systeme. Masterarbeit, Alpen-Adria-Universität, Klagenfurt (2015)
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was conducted in the scope of the project Heuristic Intelligence (HINT) funded by the Austrian research fund FFG under grant 840242.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Taupe, R., Teppan, E. (2016). Influence of ASP Language Constructs on the Performance of State-of-the-Art Solvers. In: Friedrich, G., Helmert, M., Wotawa, F. (eds) KI 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9904. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46073-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46073-4_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-46072-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-46073-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)