Two Applications of the ASP-Prolog System: Decomposable Programs and Multi-context Systems

Abstract

This paper presents two applications of the ASP-Prolog system, one of the earliest modular logic programming frameworks for integrating ASP and traditional Prolog/CLP reasoning. Both applications represent significant challenges to existing ASP technologies and share some common traits–mostly related to the inadequacy of the ground-and-solve approach. The first application stems from several practical experiences in using state-of-the-art Answer Set Programming (ASP) solvers to tackle combinatorial problems in different domains (e.g., bioinformatics, distributed constraint problem solving). A recurrent issue is the presence of computationally tractable subproblems that turn out to be challenging, or even practically infeasible, for current ASP technologies. The second application of ASP-Prolog is its use to compute the equilibrium semantics of Multi-Context Systems (MCS).