Joint Tabling of Logic Program Abductions and Updates

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated approach combining abductive logic programming and logic program updates using tabling techniques, enabling reasoning about hypothetical changes and knowledge updates within a unified framework.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of abductive logic programs with logic program updates leveraging tabling, implemented in XSB Prolog, to facilitate reasoning about change and hypothetical scenarios.

Findings

Prototype implementation in XSB Prolog demonstrates feasibility.

Joint exploitation of tabling techniques improves reasoning about updates.

Integration supports reasoning about hypothetical and external changes.

Abstract

Abductive logic programs offer a formalism to declaratively represent and reason about problems in a variety of areas: diagnosis, decision making, hypothetical reasoning, etc. On the other hand, logic program updates allow us to express knowledge changes, be they internal (or self) and external (or world) changes. Abductive logic programs and logic program updates thus naturally coexist in problems that are susceptible to hypothetical reasoning about change. Taking this as a motivation, in this paper we integrate abductive logic programs and logic program updates by jointly exploiting tabling features of logic programming. The integration is based on and benefits from the two implementation techniques we separately devised previously, viz., tabled abduction and incremental tabling for query-driven propagation of logic program updates. A prototype of the integrated system is implemented in XSB Prolog.