No abstract

Practically all programming languages allow the programmer to split a program into several modules which brings along several advantages in software development. In this paper, we are interested in the area of answer-set programming where fully declarative and nonmonotonic languages are applied. In this context, obtaining a modular structure for programs is by no means straightforward since the output of an entire program cannot in general be composed from the output of its components. To better understand the effects of disjunctive information on modularity we restrict the scope of analysis to the case of disjunctive logic programs (DLPs) subject to stable-model semantics. We define the notion of a DLP-function, where a well-defined input/output interface is provided, and establish a novel module theorem which indicates the compositionality of stable-model semantics for DLP-functions. The module theorem extends the well-known splitting-set theorem and enables the decomposition of DLP-functions given their strongly connected components based on positive dependencies induced by rules. In this setting, it is also possible to split shared disjunctive rules among components using a generalized shifting technique. The concept of modular equivalence is introduced for the mutual comparison of DLP-functions using a generalization of a translation-based verification method.

In this paper, a Gaifman–Shapiro-style module architecture is tailored to the case of smodels programs under the stable model semantics. The composition of smodels program modules is suitably limited by module conditions which ensure the compatibility of the module system with stable models. Hence the semantics of an entire smodels program depends directly on stable models assigned to its modules. This result is formalized as a module theorem which truly strengthens V. Lifschitz and H. Turner's splitting-set theorem (June 1994, Splitting a logic program. In Logic Programming: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Logic Programming, Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy, P. V. Hentenryck, Ed. MIT Press, 23–37) for the class of smodels programs. To streamline generalizations in the future, the module theorem is first proved for normal programs and then extended to cover smodels programs using a translation from the latter class of programs to the former class. Moreover, the respective notion of module-level equivalence, namely modular equivalence, is shown to be a proper congruence relation: it is preserved under substitutions of modules that are modularly equivalent. Principles for program decomposition are also addressed. The strongly connected components of the respective dependency graph can be exploited in order to extract a module structure when there is no explicit a priori knowledge about the modules of a program. The paper includes a practical demonstration of tools that have been developed for automated (de)composition of smodels programs.

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In answer set programming (ASP), a problem at hand is solved by (i) writing a logic program whose answer sets correspond to the solutions of the problem, and by (ii) computing the answer sets of the program using ananswer set solveras a search engine. Typically, a programmer creates a series of gradually improving logic programs for a particular problem when optimizing program length and execution time on a particular solver. This leads the programmer to a meta-level problem of ensuring that the programs are equivalent, i.e., they give rise to the same answer sets. To ease answer set programming at methodological level, we propose a translation-based method for verifying the equivalence of logic programs. The basic idea is to translate logic programsPandQunder consideration into a single logic program EQT(P,Q) whose answer sets (if such exist) yield counter-examples to the equivalence ofPandQ. The method is developed here in a slightly more general setting by taking thevisibilityof atoms properly into account when comparing answer sets. The translation-based approach presented in the paper has been implemented as a translator calledlpeqthat enables the verification of weak equivalence within thesmodelssystem using the same search engine as for the search of models. Our experiments withlpeqandsmodelssuggest that establishing the equivalence of logic programs in this way is in certain cases much faster than naive cross-checking of answer sets.