Compilation of Aggregates in ASP

TL;DR

This paper extends a promising compilation-based approach for handling constraints in ASP to include aggregates, addressing the grounding bottleneck and improving the scalability of ASP solving in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel extension of the compilation approach to handle aggregate constraints in ASP, enhancing its applicability and effectiveness.

Findings

Effective handling of aggregate constraints demonstrated

Significant reduction in grounding size achieved

Improved scalability in real-world ASP problems

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-known problem-solving formalism in computational logic. Nowadays, ASP is used in many real world scenarios thanks to ASP solvers. Standard evaluation of ASP programs suffers from an intrinsic limitation, knows as Grounding Bottleneck, due to the grounding of some rules that could fit all the available memory. As a result, there exist instances of real world problems that are untractable using the standard Ground and Solve approach. In order to tackle this problem, different strategies have been proposed. Among them we focus on a recent approach based on compilation of problematic constraints as propagators, which revealed to be very promising but is currently limited to constraints without aggregates. Since aggregates are widely used in ASP, in this paper we extend such an approach also to constraints containing aggregates. Good results, that proof the effectiveness of the proposed approach, have been reached.