Preliminary Report on WASP 2.0
This is an incremental improvement for researchers and practitioners in declarative programming, specifically in ASP solving.
The paper tackles the challenge of improving the performance of the Answer Set Programming (ASP) solver WASP, reporting that the new version shows a substantial increase in performance on benchmarks from the 3rd ASP competition.
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm. The intrinsic complexity of the evaluation of ASP programs makes the development of more effective and faster systems a challenging research topic. This paper reports on the recent improvements of the ASP solver WASP. WASP is undergoing a refactoring process which will end up in the release of a new and more performant version of the software. In particular the paper focus on the improvements to the core evaluation algorithms working on normal programs. A preliminary experiment on benchmarks from the 3rd ASP competition belonging to the NP class is reported. The previous version of WASP was often not competitive with alternative solutions on this class. The new version of WASP shows a substantial increase in performance.