ASP-FZN: A Translation-based Constraint Answer Set Solver

TL;DR

ASP-FZN is a new solver that translates Constraint Answer Set Programming into FlatZinc, enabling the use of various backend solvers and demonstrating competitive performance on benchmarks.

Contribution

It introduces a translation-based approach for CASP into FlatZinc, supporting rich linear constraints and global constraints, and shows competitive results against existing solvers.

Findings

asp-fzn is competitive with state-of-the-art ASP solvers

asp-fzn outperforms clingcon on some CASP benchmarks

asp-fzn supports a rich language of linear and global constraints

Abstract

We present the solver asp-fzn for Constraint Answer Set Programming (CASP), which extends ASP with linear constraints. Our approach is based on translating CASP programs into the solver-independent FlatZinc language that supports several Constraint Programming and Integer Programming backend solvers. Our solver supports a rich language of linear constraints, including some common global constraints. As for evaluation, we show that asp-fzn is competitive with state-of-the-art ASP solvers on benchmarks taken from past ASP competitions. Furthermore, we evaluate it on several CASP problems from the literature and compare its performance with clingcon, which is a prominent CASP solver that supports most of the asp-fzn language. The performance of asp-fzn is very promising as it is already competitive on plain ASP and even outperforms clingcon on some CASP benchmarks.