Implementing Metric Temporal Answer Set Programming

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable computational approach to Metric Answer Set Programming that handles quantitative temporal constraints efficiently by leveraging difference constraints to decouple time granularity from ASP grounding.

Contribution

It presents a novel method that integrates difference constraints into ASP to manage temporal constraints without impacting scalability.

Findings

Decouples temporal constraints from ASP grounding complexity.

Maintains scalability even with fine-grained timing constraints.

Effectively handles durations and deadlines in temporal reasoning.

Abstract

We develop a computational approach to Metric Answer Set Programming (ASP) to allow for expressing quantitative temporal constraints, like durations and deadlines. A central challenge is to maintain scalability when dealing with fine-grained timing constraints, which can significantly exacerbate ASP's grounding bottleneck. To address this issue, we leverage extensions of ASP with difference constraints, a simplified form of linear constraints, to handle time-related aspects externally. Our approach effectively decouples metric ASP from the granularity of time, resulting in a solution that is unaffected by time precision.