Constraints, Lazy Constraints, or Propagators in ASP Solving: An Empirical Analysis

TL;DR

This paper empirically compares various strategies in ASP solving to avoid expensive constraint grounding, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses through real and synthetic benchmarks.

Contribution

It provides a systematic empirical analysis of alternative ASP solving strategies that bypass costly grounding, which is a novel investigation in this domain.

Findings

Different strategies have distinct strengths and weaknesses.

Custom solver extensions can effectively avoid expensive grounding.

Empirical results guide strategy selection for ASP applications.

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established declarative paradigm. One of the successes of ASP is the availability of efficient systems. State-of-the-art systems are based on the ground+solve approach. In some applications this approach is infeasible because the grounding of one or few constraints is expensive. In this paper, we systematically compare alternative strategies to avoid the instantiation of problematic constraints, that are based on custom extensions of the solver. Results on real and synthetic benchmarks highlight some strengths and weaknesses of the different strategies. (Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP, ICLP 2017 Special Issue.)