The Alpha Solver for Lazy-Grounding Answer-Set Programming

Antonius Weinzierl1, Bart Bogaerts2, Jori Bomanson3, Thomas Eiter1,
Gerhard Friedrich4, Tomi Janhunen3;5, Tobias Kaminski1, Michael Langowski1, Lorenz Leutgeb1, Gottfried Schenner6, Richard Taupe4;6
1 Institute of Logic and Computation, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
2 Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium
3 Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland
4 Department of Applied Informatics, Alpen-Adria-Universitat Klagenfurt, Austria
5 Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Finland
6 Corporate Technology, Siemens AG  Osterreich

Download Full Paper.

Abstract. The grounding bottleneck is a longstanding issue of Answer Set Programming (ASP), a well-known Logic Programming formalism widely used for declarative problem solving. Lazy grounding as realized by the recent Alpha system avoids this grounding bottleneck but faces new challenges that are genuine to lazy grounding. This article first gives an overview of lazy-grounding ASP solving by Alpha and provides information on how to obtain and use the system. It then presents research issues raised by lazy-grounding and overviews those which have been addressed already.