Reasoning about Study Regulations in Answer Set Programming

TL;DR

This paper formalizes study regulations at the University of Potsdam and encodes them in Answer Set Programming to automate reasoning about admissible study plans and facilitate user interaction.

Contribution

It provides a formal account of study regulations and a novel ASP encoding to generate and explore valid study plans.

Findings

Formalization of study regulations as logical principles

ASP encoding of study regulations for plan generation

Extension to a user interface for plan exploration

Abstract

We are interested in automating reasoning with and about study regulations, catering to various stakeholders, ranging from administrators, over faculty, to students at different stages. Our work builds on an extensive analysis of various study programs at the University of Potsdam. The conceptualization of the underlying principles provides us with a formal account of study regulations. In particular, the formalization reveals the properties of admissible study plans. With these at end, we propose an encoding of study regulations in Answer Set Programming that produces corresponding study plans. Finally, we show how this approach can be extended to a generic user interface for exploring study plans.