scholarly journals Solution Enumeration by Optimality in Answer Set Programming

Author(s):  
JUKKA PAJUNEN ◽  
TOMI JANHUNEN

Abstract Given a combinatorial search problem, it may be highly useful to enumerate its (all) solutions besides just finding one solution, or showing that none exists. The same can be stated about optimal solutions if an objective function is provided. This work goes beyond the bare enumeration of optimal solutions and addresses the computational task of solution enumeration by optimality (SEO). This task is studied in the context of answer set programming (ASP) where (optimal) solutions of a problem are captured with the answer sets of a logic program encoding the problem. Existing answer set solvers already support the enumeration of all (optimal) answer sets. However, in this work, we generalize the enumeration of optimal answer sets beyond strictly optimal ones, giving rise to the idea of answer set enumeration in the order of optimality (ASEO). This approach is applicable up to the best k answer sets or in an unlimited setting, which amounts to a process of sorting answer sets based on the objective function. As the main contribution of this work, we present the first general algorithms for the aforementioned tasks of answer set enumeration. Moreover, we illustrate the potential use cases of ASEO. First, we study how efficiently access to the next-best solutions can be achieved in a number of optimization problems that have been formalized and solved in ASP. Second, we show that ASEO provides us with an effective sampling technique for Bayesian networks.

AI Magazine ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kaufmann ◽  
Nicola Leone ◽  
Simona Perri ◽  
Torsten Schaub

Answer set programming is a declarative problem solving paradigm that rests upon a workflow involving modeling, grounding, and solving. While the former is described by Gebser and Schaub (2016), we focus here on key issues in grounding, or how to systematically replace object variables by ground terms in a effective way, and solving, or how to compute the answer sets of a propositional logic program obtained by grounding.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 974-989
Author(s):  
AYSU BOGATARKAN ◽  
ESRA ERDEM

AbstractThe multi-agent path finding (MAPF) problem is a combinatorial search problem that aims at finding paths for multiple agents (e.g., robots) in an environment (e.g., an autonomous warehouse) such that no two agents collide with each other, and subject to some constraints on the lengths of paths. We consider a general version of MAPF, called mMAPF, that involves multi-modal transportation modes (e.g., due to velocity constraints) and consumption of different types of resources (e.g., batteries). The real-world applications of mMAPF require flexibility (e.g., solving variations of mMAPF) as well as explainability. Our earlier studies on mMAPF have focused on the former challenge of flexibility. In this study, we focus on the latter challenge of explainability, and introduce a method for generating explanations for queries regarding the feasibility and optimality of solutions, the nonexistence of solutions, and the observations about solutions. Our method is based on answer set programming.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 603-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANCESCO CALIMERI ◽  
SIMONA PERRI ◽  
JESSICA ZANGARI

AbstractAnswer Set Programming (ASP) is a purely declarative formalism developed in the field of logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning: computational problems are encoded by logic programs whose answer sets, corresponding to solutions, are computed by an ASP system. Different, semantically equivalent, programs can be defined for the same problem; however, performance of systems evaluating them might significantly vary. We propose an approach for automatically transforming an input logic program into an equivalent one that can be evaluated more efficiently. One can make use of existing tree-decomposition techniques for rewriting selected rules into a set of multiple ones; the idea is to guide and adaptively apply them on the basis of proper new heuristics, to obtain a smart rewriting algorithm to be integrated into an ASP system. The method is rather general: it can be adapted to any system and implement different preference policies. Furthermore, we define a set of new heuristics tailored at optimizing grounding, one of the main phases of the ASP computation; we use them in order to implement the approach into the ASP systemDLV, in particular into its grounding subsystemℐ-DLV, and carry out an extensive experimental activity for assessing the impact of the proposal.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 891-907
Author(s):  
MARIO ALVIANO ◽  
CARMINE DODARO ◽  
JOHANNES K. FICHTE ◽  
MARKUS HECHER ◽  
TOBIAS PHILIPP ◽  
...  

AbstractAnswer Set Programming (ASP) solvers are highly-tuned and complex procedures that implicitly solve the consistency problem, i.e., deciding whether a logic program admits an answer set. Verifying whether a claimed answer set is formally a correct answer set of the program can be decided in polynomial time for (normal) programs. However, it is far from immediate to verify whether a program that is claimed to be inconsistent, indeed does not admit any answer sets. In this paper, we address this problem and develop the new proof format ASP-DRUPE for propositional, disjunctive logic programs, including weight and choice rules. ASP-DRUPE is based on the Reverse Unit Propagation (RUP) format designed for Boolean satisfiability. We establish correctness of ASP-DRUPE and discuss how to integrate it into modern ASP solvers. Later, we provide an implementation of ASP-DRUPE into the wasp solver for normal logic programs.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 697-744 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOMI JANHUNEN ◽  
EMILIA OIKARINEN

AbstractIn answer set programming (ASP), a problem at hand is solved by (i) writing a logic program whose answer sets correspond to the solutions of the problem, and by (ii) computing the answer sets of the program using ananswer set solveras a search engine. Typically, a programmer creates a series of gradually improving logic programs for a particular problem when optimizing program length and execution time on a particular solver. This leads the programmer to a meta-level problem of ensuring that the programs are equivalent, i.e., they give rise to the same answer sets. To ease answer set programming at methodological level, we propose a translation-based method for verifying the equivalence of logic programs. The basic idea is to translate logic programsPandQunder consideration into a single logic program EQT(P,Q) whose answer sets (if such exist) yield counter-examples to the equivalence ofPandQ. The method is developed here in a slightly more general setting by taking thevisibilityof atoms properly into account when comparing answer sets. The translation-based approach presented in the paper has been implemented as a translator calledlpeqthat enables the verification of weak equivalence within thesmodelssystem using the same search engine as for the search of models. Our experiments withlpeqandsmodelssuggest that establishing the equivalence of logic programs in this way is in certain cases much faster than naive cross-checking of answer sets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 767-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEDRO CABALAR ◽  
JORGE FANDINNO ◽  
YULIYA LIERLER

AbstractIn this paper, we study the problem of formal verification for Answer Set Programming (ASP), namely, obtaining a formal proof showing that the answer sets of a given (non-ground) logic program P correctly correspond to the solutions to the problem encoded by P, regardless of the problem instance. To this aim, we use a formal specification language based on ASP modules, so that each module can be proved to capture some informal aspect of the problem in an isolated way. This specification language relies on a novel definition of (possibly nested, first order) program modules that may incorporate local hidden atoms at different levels. Then, verifying the logic program P amounts to prove some kind of equivalence between P and its modular specification.


10.29007/cnzw ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aysu Bogatarkan ◽  
Volkan Patoglu ◽  
Esra Erdem

The multi-agent path finding (MAPF) problem is a combinatorial search problem that aims at finding paths for multiple agents such that no two agents collide with each other. We study a dynamic variant of MAPF, called D-MAPF, which allows changes in the environment (e.g., some existing obstacles may be removed from the environment or moved to some other location, or new obstacles may be included in the environment), and/or changes in the team (e.g., some existing agents may leave and some new agents may join the team) at different times. We introduce a new method to solve D-MAPF, using answer set programming.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 571-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOBIAS KAMINSKI ◽  
THOMAS EITER ◽  
KATSUMI INOUE

AbstractMeta-Interpretive Learning (MIL) learns logic programs from examples by instantiating meta-rules, which is implemented by the Metagol system based on Prolog. Viewing MIL-problems as combinatorial search problems, they can alternatively be solved by employing Answer Set Programming (ASP), which may result in performance gains as a result of efficient conflict propagation. However, a straightforward ASP-encoding of MIL results in a huge search space due to a lack of procedural bias and the need for grounding. To address these challenging issues, we encode MIL in the HEX-formalism, which is an extension of ASP that allows us to outsource the background knowledge, and we restrict the search space to compensate for a procedural bias in ASP. This way, the import of constants from the background knowledge can for a given type of meta-rules be limited to relevant ones. Moreover, by abstracting from term manipulations in the encoding and by exploiting the HEX interface mechanism, the import of such constants can be entirely avoided in order to mitigate the grounding bottleneck. An experimental evaluation shows promising results.


2009 ◽  
pp. 2261-2267
Author(s):  
Fernando Zacarías Flores ◽  
Dionicio Zacarías Flores ◽  
Rosalba Cuapa Canto ◽  
Luis Miguel Guzmán Muñoz

Updates, is a central issue in relational databases and knowledge databases. In the last years, it has been well studied in the non-monotonic reasoning paradigm. Several semantics for logic program updates have been proposed (Brewka, Dix, & Knonolige 1997), (De Schreye, Hermenegildo, & Pereira, 1999) (Katsumo & Mendelzon, 1991). However, recently a set of proposals has been characterized to propose mechanisms of updates based on logic and logic programming. All these mechanisms are built on semantics based on structural properties (Eiter, Fink, Sabattini & Thompits, 2000) (Leite, 2002) (Banti, Alferes & Brogi, 2003) (Zacarias, 2005). Furthermore, all these semantic ones coincide in considering the AGM proposal as the standard model in the update theory, for their wealth in properties. The AGM approach, introduced in (Alchourron, Gardenfors & Makinson, 1985) is the dominating paradigm in the area, but in the context of monotonic logic. All these proposals analyze and reinterpret the AGM postulates under the Answer Set Programming (ASP) such as (Eiter, Fink, Sabattini & Thompits, 2000). However, the majority of the adapted AGM and update postulates are violated by update programs, as shown in(De Schreye, Hermenegildo, & Pereira, 1999).


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