ASP-FZN: A Translation-based Constraint Answer Set Solver
This work addresses the need for efficient solvers in constraint answer set programming, an incremental improvement by integrating existing translation methods with backend solvers.
The paper tackles the problem of solving Constraint Answer Set Programming (CASP) by introducing asp-fzn, a solver that translates CASP programs into the FlatZinc language for use with various backend solvers. The result shows that asp-fzn is competitive with state-of-the-art ASP solvers on standard benchmarks and outperforms the prominent CASP solver clingcon on some CASP benchmarks.
We present the solver asp-fzn for Constraint Answer Set Programming (CASP), which extends ASP with linear constraints. Our approach is based on translating CASP programs into the solver-independent FlatZinc language that supports several Constraint Programming and Integer Programming backend solvers. Our solver supports a rich language of linear constraints, including some common global constraints. As for evaluation, we show that asp-fzn is competitive with state-of-the-art ASP solvers on benchmarks taken from past ASP competitions. Furthermore, we evaluate it on several CASP problems from the literature and compare its performance with clingcon, which is a prominent CASP solver that supports most of the asp-fzn language. The performance of asp-fzn is very promising as it is already competitive on plain ASP and even outperforms clingcon on some CASP benchmarks.