First-order ASP programs as CHR programs

Abstract

We present in this paper a way to use the paradigm of Answer Set Programming (ASP) into the Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) paradigm. We present a translation of the ASP language to the Constraint Handling Rules language. The committed-choice principle of the CHR paradigm leads to choose the rule-oriented approach of answer set computation. Since CHR is a first-order logic programming paradigm, the initial grounding phase of most of the ASP solvers is not required. Our implementation compiles an ASP program to a CHR(Prolog) program or to a CHR(C++) program. Preliminary experiments of the latter present some interesting results on ASP programs with some large sets of facts. Since Constraint Handling Rules is a paradigm developed for the implementation of user-defined constraints, we show how some extensions of ASP may be easily implemented in CHR: we show this by example for the choice rule.