Influence of ASP Language Constructs on...

Answer Set Programming (ASP) under the stable model semantics supports various language constructs which can be used to express the same realities in syntactically different, but semantically equivalent ways. However, these equivalent programs may not perform equally well. This is because performance depends on the underlying solver implementations that may treat different language constructs differently. As performance is very important for the successful application of ASP in real-life domains, knowledge about the mutual interchangeability and performance of ASP language constructs is crucial for knowledge engineers. In this article, we present an investigation on how the usage of different language constructs affects the performance of state-of-the-art solvers and grounders on benchmark problems from the ASP competition. Hereby, we focus on constructs used to express disjunction or choice, classical negation, and various aggregate functions. Some interesting effects of language constructs on solving performance are revealed.