Translating NP-SPEC into ASP

TL;DR

This paper presents translations of NP-SPEC, a language for specifying NP problems, into Answer Set Programming (ASP), enabling better implementation and potential language enhancements.

Contribution

It introduces methods for translating NP-SPEC into ASP and discusses integrating NP-SPEC features into mainstream ASP.

Findings

Effective translation methods from NP-SPEC to ASP

Analysis of translation approaches and their implications

Potential for incorporating NP-SPEC constructs into ASP

Abstract

NP-SPEC is a language for specifying problems in NP in a declarative way. Despite the fact that the semantics of the language was given by referring to Datalog with circumscription, which is very close to ASP, so far the only existing implementations are by means of ECLiPSe Prolog and via Boolean satisfiability solvers. In this paper, we present translations from NP-SPEC into various forms of ASP and analyze them. We also argue that it might be useful to incorporate certain language constructs of NP-SPEC into mainstream ASP.