Answer Set Programming: A Declarative Approach to Solving Challenging Search Problems

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm targeted to solving search problems. The basic idea of ASP is similar to, for example, SAT-based planning or constraint satisfaction problems but ASP provides a more powerful knowledge representation language for effective problem encoding. A number of successful ASP systems have already been developed and applied in a large range of areas. The talk explains the theoretical underpinnings of ASP, introduces the answer set programming paradigm, outlines computational techniques used in current ASP solvers, and discusses some interesting applications of the approach.