Extending and implementing the stable model semantics

A novel logic program like language, weight constraint rules, is developed for answer set programming purposes. It generalizes normal logic programs by allowing weight constraints in place of literals to represent, e.g., cardinality and resource constraints and by providing optimization capabilities. A declarative semantics is developed which extends the stable model semantics of normal programs. The computational complexity of the language is shown to be similar to that of normal programs under the stable model semantics. A simple embedding of general weight constraint rules to a small subclass of the language called basic constraint rules is devised. An implementation of the language, the SMODELS System, is developed based on this embedding. It uses a two level architecture consisting of a front-end and a kernel language implementation. The front-end allows restricted use of variables and functions and compiles general weight constraint rules to basic constraint rules. A major part of the work is the development of an efficient search procedure for computing stable models for this kernel language. The procedure is compared with and empirically tested against satisfiability checkers and an implementation of the stable model semantics. It offers a competitive implementation of the stable model semantics for normal programs and attractive performance for problems where the new types of rules provide a compact representation. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.