Describing complex objects by elementary ones is a common strategy in mathematics and science in general. In their seminal 1965 paper, Kenneth Krohn and John Rhodes showed that every finite deterministic automaton can be represented (or “emulated”) by a cascade product of very simple automata. This led to an elegant algebraic theory of automata based on finite semigroups (Krohn-Rhodes Theory). Surprisingly, by relating logic programs and automata, we can show in this paper that the Krohn-Rhodes Theory is applicable in Answer Set Programming (ASP). More precisely, we recast the concept of a cascade product to ASP, and prove that every program can be represented by a product of very simple programs, the reset and standard programs. Roughly, this implies that the reset and standard programs are the basic building blocks of ASP with respect to the cascade product. In a broader sense, this paper is a first step towards an algebraic theory of products and networks of nonmonotonic reasoning systems based on Krohn-Rhodes Theory, aiming at important open issues in ASP and AI in general.

Extensional higher-order logic programming has been introduced as a generalization of classical logic programming. An important characteristic of this paradigm is that it preserves all the well-known properties of traditional logic programming. In this paper we consider the semantics of negation in the context of the new paradigm. Using some recent results from non-monotonic fixed-point theory, we demonstrate that every higher-order logic program with negation has a unique minimum infinite-valued model. In this way we obtain the first purely model-theoretic semantics for negation in extensional higher-order logic programming. Using our approach, we resolve an old paradox that was introduced by W. W. Wadge in order to demonstrate the semantic difficulties of higher-order logic programming.

We present a novel general resource analysis for logic programs based on sized types. Sized types are representations that incorporate structural (shape) information and allow expressing both lower and upper bounds on the size of a set of terms and their subterms at any position and depth. They also allow relating the sizes of terms and subterms occurring at different argument positions in logic predicates. Using these sized types, the resource analysis can infer both lower and upper bounds on the resources used by all the procedures in a program as functions on input term (and subterm) sizes, overcoming limitations of existing resource analyses and enhancing their precision. Our new resource analysis has been developed within the abstract interpretation framework, as an extension of the sized types abstract domain, and has been integrated into the Ciao preprocessor, CiaoPP. The abstract domain operations are integrated with the setting up and solving of recurrence equations for inferring both size and resource usage functions. We show that the analysis is an improvement over the previous resource analysis present in CiaoPP and compares well in power to state of the art systems.

Query answering in Answer Set Programming (ASP) is usually solved by computing (a subset of) the cautious consequences of a logic program. This task is computationally very hard, and there are programs for which computing cautious consequences is not viable in reasonable time. However, current ASP solvers produce the (whole) set of cautious consequences only at the end of their computation. This paper reports on strategies for computing cautious consequences, also introducing anytime algorithms able to produce sound answers during the computation.

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are routinely created to simplify difficult or specialized programming tasks. They expose useful abstractions and design patterns in the form of language constructs, provide static semantics to eagerly detect misuse of these constructs, and dynamic semantics to completely define how language constructs interact. However, implementing and composing DSLs is a non-trivial task, and there is a lack of tools and techniques.

We address this problem by presenting a complete module system over LP for DSL construction, reuse, and composition. LP is already useful for DSL design, because it supports executable language specifications using notations familiar to language designers. We extend LP with a module system that is simple (with a few concepts), succinct (for key DSL specification scenarios), and composable (on the level of languages, compilers, and programs). These design choices reflect our use of LP for industrial DSL design. Our module system has been implemented in the formula language, and was used to build key Windows 8 device drivers via DSLs. Though we present our module system as it actually appears in our formula language, our emphasis is on concepts adaptable to other LP languages.

Automatic techniques for program verification usually suffer the well-known state explosion problem. Most of the classical approaches are based on browsing the structure of some form of model (which represents the behavior of the program) to check if a given specification is valid. This implies that a part of the model has to be built, and sometimes the needed fragment is quite huge.

In this work, we provide an alternative automatic decision method to check whether a given property, specified in a linear temporal logic, is valid w.r.t. a tccp program. Our proposal (based on abstract interpretation techniques) does not require to build any model at all. Our results guarantee correctness but, as usual when using an abstract semantics, completeness is lost.