The third open Answer Set Programming competition
This is an incremental update for the ASP community, providing a standardized evaluation of declarative programming systems.
The paper reports on the Third Open Answer Set Programming Competition, which compared ASP systems on benchmark problems across two tracks, and discusses results and comparisons with previous competitions and state-of-the-art solutions.
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming in close relationship with other declarative formalisms such as SAT Modulo Theories, Constraint Handling Rules, FO(.), PDDL and many others. Since its first informal editions, ASP systems have been compared in the now well-established ASP Competition. The Third (Open) ASP Competition, as the sequel to the ASP Competitions Series held at the University of Potsdam in Germany (2006-2007) and at the University of Leuven in Belgium in 2009, took place at the University of Calabria (Italy) in the first half of 2011. Participants competed on a pre-selected collection of benchmark problems, taken from a variety of domains as well as real world applications. The Competition ran on two tracks: the Model and Solve (M&S) Track, based on an open problem encoding, and open language, and open to any kind of system based on a declarative specification paradigm; and the System Track, run on the basis of fixed, public problem encodings, written in a standard ASP language. This paper discusses the format of the Competition and the rationale behind it, then reports the results for both tracks. Comparison with the second ASP competition and state-of-the-art solutions for some of the benchmark domains is eventually discussed. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).