selp: A Single-Shot Epistemic Logic Program Solver

TL;DR

The paper introduces 'selp', a novel single-shot solver for Epistemic Logic Programs that translates ELPs into non-ground ASP, enabling efficient, one-pass solving and demonstrating competitive performance on benchmarks.

Contribution

It presents a direct translation method from ELPs to ASP, allowing single-shot solving, and implements this in the 'selp' system with competitive results.

Findings

Single-shot solving of ELPs is feasible via translation to ASP.

'selp' demonstrates competitive performance on benchmark instances.

The approach reduces the need for multiple ASP solver calls.

Abstract

Epistemic Logic Programs (ELPs) are an extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) with epistemic operators that allow for a form of meta-reasoning, that is, reasoning over multiple possible worlds. Existing ELP solving approaches generally rely on making multiple calls to an ASP solver in order to evaluate the ELP. However, in this paper, we show that there also exists a direct translation from ELPs into non-ground ASP with bounded arity. The resulting ASP program can thus be solved in a single shot. We then implement this encoding method, using recently proposed techniques to handle large, non-ground ASP rules, into the prototype ELP solving system "selp", which we present in this paper. This solver exhibits competitive performance on a set of ELP benchmark instances. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).