Combining Answer Set Programming and Domain Heuristics for Solving Hard Industrial Problems (Application Paper)

TL;DR

This paper enhances Answer Set Programming (ASP) by integrating domain heuristics to effectively solve complex industrial problems like PUP and CCP, significantly improving solver performance on real-world instances.

Contribution

It introduces an interface for embedding domain-specific heuristics into ASP solvers, enabling them to solve previously intractable industrial problems.

Findings

ASP solver with heuristics solves all Siemens' real-world instances

Performance of ASP significantly improved with domain heuristics

Extended WASP solver facilitates embedding new heuristics

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular logic programming paradigm that has been applied for solving a variety of complex problems. Among the most challenging real-world applications of ASP are two industrial problems defined by Siemens: the Partner Units Problem (PUP) and the Combined Configuration Problem (CCP). The hardest instances of PUP and CCP are out of reach for state-of-the-art ASP solvers. Experiments show that the performance of ASP solvers could be significantly improved by embedding domain-specific heuristics, but a proper effective integration of such criteria in off-the-shelf ASP implementations is not obvious. In this paper the combination of ASP and domain-specific heuristics is studied with the goal of effectively solving real-world problem instances of PUP and CCP. As a byproduct of this activity, the ASP solver WASP was extended with an interface that eases embedding new external heuristics in the solver. The evaluation shows that our domain-heuristic-driven ASP solver finds solutions for all the real-world instances of PUP and CCP ever provided by Siemens. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.