The Multi-engine ASP Solver ME-ASP: Progress Report

TL;DR

This paper presents an improved implementation of the ME-ASP multi-engine solver for ground ASP programs and explores applying algorithm selection techniques to non-ground programs, demonstrating performance benefits.

Contribution

The paper introduces a faster version of ME-ASP and extends its application to non-ground programs using algorithm selection techniques.

Findings

New implementation is substantially faster.

Algorithm selection benefits observed for non-ground programs.

Multi-engine approach effective for diverse ASP program types.

Abstract

MEASP is a multi-engine solver for ground ASP programs. It exploits algorithm selection techniques based on classification to select one among a set of out-of-the-box heterogeneous ASP solvers used as black-box engines. In this paper we report on (i) a new optimized implementation of MEASP; and (ii) an attempt of applying algorithm selection to non-ground programs. An experimental analysis reported in the paper shows that (i) the new implementation of \measp is substantially faster than the previous version; and (ii) the multi-engine recipe can be applied to the evaluation of non-ground programs with some benefits.