Constraint Answer Set Programming without Grounding

Understand

Extending ASP with constraints (CASP) enhances its expressiveness and performance.

• This extension is not straightforward as the grounding phase, present in most ASP systems, removes variables and the links among them, and also causes a combinatorial explosion in the size of the program.
• Several methods to overcome this issue have been devised: restricting the constraint domains (e.g., discrete instead of dense), or the type (or number) of models that can be returned.
• In this paper we propose to incorporate constraints into s(ASP), a goal-directed, top-down execution model which implements ASP while retaining logical variables both during execution and in the answer sets.