Smart Expansion Techniques for ASP-based Interactive Configuration

TL;DR

This paper introduces enhanced smart expansion functions for ASP-based interactive configuration, significantly improving performance by reducing search space and unsatisfiability checks, and provides a user interface for industrial applications.

Contribution

It proposes four novel smart expansion functions that optimize multi-shot ASP solving for large-scale industrial configuration problems.

Findings

Performance improved by limiting unsatisfiability checks

Search space reduced through cautious and brave consequences

Effective user interface implementation in ASP

Abstract

Product configuration is a successful application of Answer Set Programming (ASP). However, challenges are still open for interactive systems to effectively guide users through the configuration process. The aim of our work is to provide an ASP-based solver for interactive configuration that can deal with large-scale industrial configuration problems and that supports intuitive user interfaces via an API. In this paper, we focus on improving the performance of automatically completing a partial configuration. Our main contribution enhances the classical incremental approach for multi-shot solving by four different smart expansion functions. The core idea is to determine and add specific objects or associations to the partial configuration by exploiting cautious and brave consequences before checking for the existence of a complete configuration with the current objects in each iteration. This approach limits the number of costly unsatisfiability checks and reduces the search space, thereby improving solving performance. In addition, we present a user interface that uses our API and is implemented in ASP.