asprin: Customizing Answer Set Preferences without a Headache

TLDR

The paper introduces asprin, a flexible framework for managing preferences among stable models of logic programs. asprin lets users define complex preference types, encodes them as preference programs for dominance testing, and supplies algorithms to compute one or all optimal stable models. The algorithms’ performance depends on dominance‑test complexity and utilizes multi‑shot answer set solving.

Abstract

In this paper we describe asprin, a general, flexible, and extensible framework for handling preferences among the stable models of a logic program. We show how complex preference relations can be specified through user-defined preference types and their arguments. We describe how preference specifications are handled internally by so-called preference programs, which are used for dominance testing. We also give algorithms for computing one, or all, optimal stable models of a logic program. Notably, our algorithms depend on the complexity of the dominance tests and make use of multi-shot answer set solving technology.