English

Answer Set Solving exploiting Treewidth and its Limits

Logic in Computer Science 2019-05-07 v1

Abstract

Parameterized algorithms have been subject to extensive research of recent years and allow to solve hard problems by exploiting a parameter of the corresponding problem instances. There, one goal is to devise algorithms, where the runtime is exponential exclusively in this parameter. One particular well-studied structural parameter is treewidth. Typically, a parameterized algorithm utilizing treewidth takes or computes a tree decomposition, which is an arrangement of a graph into a tree, and evaluates the problem in parts by dynamic programming on the tree decomposition. In our research, we want to exploit treewidth in the context of Answer Set Programming (ASP), a declarative modeling and solving framework, which has been successfully applied in several application domains and industries for years. So far, we presented algorithms for ASP for the full ASP-Core-2 syntax, which is competitive especially when it comes to counting answer sets. Since dynamic programming on tree decomposition lands itself well to counting, we designed a framework for projected model counting, which applies to ASP, abstract argumentation and even to problems higher in the polynomial hierarchy. Given standard assumptions in computational complexity, we established a novel methodology for showing lower bounds, and we showed that most worst-case runtimes of our algorithms cannot be significantly improved.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.01688,
  title  = {Answer Set Solving exploiting Treewidth and its Limits},
  author = {Markus Hecher},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.01688},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:57:24.473Z