ISO Prolog provides catch and throw to realize the control flow of exception handling. This pearl demonstrates that catch and throw are inconspicuously amenable to the implementation of backjumping. In fact, they have precisely the semantics required: rewinding the search to a specific point and carrying of a preserved term to that point. The utility of these properties is demonstrated through an implementation of graph coloring with backjumping and a backjumping SAT solver that applies conflict-driven clause learning.

Precondition inference is a non-trivial problem with important applications in program analysis and verification. We present a novel iterative method for automatically deriving preconditions for the safety and unsafety of programs. Each iteration maintains over-approximations of the set of safe and unsafe initial states, which are used to partition the program’s initial states into those known to be safe, known to be unsafe and unknown. We then construct revised programs with those unknown initial states and iterate the procedure until the approximations are disjoint or some termination criteria are met. An experimental evaluation of the method on a set of software verification benchmarks shows that it can infer precise preconditions (sometimes optimal) that are not possible using previous methods.

The chase procedure for existential rules is an indispensable tool for several database applications, where its termination guarantees the decidability of these tasks. Most previous studies have focused on the skolem chase variant and its termination analysis. It is known that the restricted chase variant is a more powerful tool in termination analysis provided a database is given. But all-instance termination presents a challenge since the critical database and similar techniques do not work. In this paper, we develop a novel technique to characterize the activeness of all possible cycles of a certain length for the restricted chase, which leads to the formulation of a framework of parameterized classes of the finite restricted chase, called $k$-$\mathsf{safe}(\Phi)$ rule sets. This approach applies to any class of finite skolem chase identified with a condition of acyclicity. More generally, we show that the approach can be applied to the hierarchy of bounded rule sets previously only defined for the skolem chase. Experiments on a collection of ontologies from the web show the applicability of the proposed methods on real-world ontologies.

Modal logic S5 has attracted significant attention and has led to several practical applications, owing to its simplified approach to dealing with nesting modal operators. Efficient implementations for evaluating satisfiability of S5 formulas commonly rely on Skolemisation to convert them into propositional logic formulas, essentially by introducing copies of propositional atoms for each set of interpretations (possible worlds). This approach is simple, but often results into large formulas that are too difficult to process, and therefore more parsimonious constructions are required. In this work, we propose to use Answer Set Programming for implementing such constructions, and in particular for identifying the propositional atoms that are relevant in every world by means of a reachability relation. The proposed encodings are designed to take advantage of other properties such as entailment relations of subformulas rooted by modal operators. An empirical assessment of the proposed encodings shows that the reachability relation is very effective and leads to comparable performance to a state-of-the-art S5 solver based on SAT, while entailment relations are possibly too expensive to reason about and may result in overhead.

Abstraction is a well-known approach to simplify a complex problem by over-approximating it with a deliberate loss of information. It was not considered so far in Answer Set Programming (ASP), a convenient tool for problem solving. We introduce a method to automatically abstract ASP programs that preserves their structure by reducing the vocabulary while ensuring an over-approximation (i.e., each original answer set maps to some abstract answer set). This allows for generating partial answer set candidates that can help with approximation of reasoning. Computing the abstract answer sets is intuitively easier due to a smaller search space, at the cost of encountering spurious answer sets. Faithful (non-spurious) abstractions may be used to represent projected answer sets and to guide solvers in answer set construction. For dealing with spurious answer sets, we employ an ASP debugging approach to help with abstraction refinement, which determines atoms as badly omitted and adds them back in the abstraction. As a show case, we apply abstraction to explain unsatisfiability of ASP programs in terms of blocker sets, which are the sets of atoms such that abstraction to them preserves unsatisfiability. Their usefulness is demonstrated by experimental results.

Description logics (DLs) are well-known knowledge representation formalisms focused on the representation of terminological knowledge. Due to their first-order semantics, these languages (in their classical form) are not suitable for representing and handling uncertainty. A probabilistic extension of a light-weight DL was recently proposed for dealing with certain knowledge occurring in uncertain contexts. In this paper, we continue that line of research by introducing the Bayesian extension of the propositionally closed DL . We present a tableau-based procedure for deciding consistency and adapt it to solve other probabilistic, contextual, and general inferences in this logic. We also show that all these problems remain ExpTime-complete, the same as reasoning in the underlying classical .

Epistemic logic programs constitute an extension of the stable model semantics to deal with new constructs called subjective literals. Informally speaking, a subjective literal allows checking whether some objective literal is true in all or some stable models. As it can be imagined, the associated semantics has proved to be non-trivial, since the truth of subjective literals may interfere with the set of stable models it is supposed to query. As a consequence, no clear agreement has been reached and different semantic proposals have been made in the literature. Unfortunately, comparison among these proposals has been limited to a study of their effect on individual examples, rather than identifying general properties to be checked. In this paper, we propose an extension of the well-known splitting property for logic programs to the epistemic case. We formally define when an arbitrary semantics satisfies the epistemic splitting property and examine some of the consequences that can be derived from that, including its relation to conformant planning and to epistemic constraints. Interestingly, we prove (through counterexamples) that most of the existing approaches fail to fulfill the epistemic splitting property, except the original semantics proposed by Gelfond 1991 and a recent proposal by the authors, called Founded Autoepistemic Equilibrium Logic.

Context-sensitive global analysis of large code bases can be expensive, which can make its use impractical during software development. However, there are many situations in which modifications are small and isolated within a few components, and it is desirable to reuse as much as possible previous analysis results. This has been achieved to date through incremental global analysis fixpoint algorithms that achieve cost reductions at fine levels of granularity, such as changes in program lines. However, these fine-grained techniques are neither directly applicable to modular programs nor are they designed to take advantage of modular structures. This paper describes, implements, and evaluates an algorithm that performs efficient context-sensitive analysis incrementally on modular partitions of programs. The experimental results show that the proposed modular algorithm shows significant improvements, in both time and memory consumption, when compared to existing non-modular, fine-grain incremental analysis techniques. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed intermodular propagation of analysis information, our algorithm also outperforms traditional modular analysis even when analyzing from scratch.

Existential rules are a positive fragment of first-order logic that generalizes function-free Horn rules by allowing existentially quantified variables in rule heads. This family of languages has recently attracted significant interest in the context of ontology-mediated query answering. Forward chaining, also known as the chase, is a fundamental tool for computing universal models of knowledge bases, which consist of existential rules and facts. Several chase variants have been defined, which differ on the way they handle redundancies. A set of existential rules is bounded if it ensures the existence of a bound on the depth of the chase, independently from any set of facts. Deciding if a set of rules is bounded is an undecidable problem for all chase variants. Nevertheless, when computing universal models, knowing that a set of rules is bounded for some chase variant does not help much in practice if the bound remains unknown or even very large. Hence, we investigate the decidability of the k-boundedness problem, which asks whether the depth of the chase for a given set of rules is bounded by an integer k. We identify a general property which, when satisfied by a chase variant, leads to the decidability of k-boundedness. We then show that the main chase variants satisfy this property, namely the oblivious, semi-oblivious (aka Skolem), and restricted chase, as well as their breadth-first versions.

We present a solution to real-world train scheduling problems, involving routing, scheduling, and optimization, based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). To this end, we pursue a hybrid approach that extends ASP with difference constraints to account for a fine-grained timing. More precisely, we exemplarily show how the hybrid ASP system clingo[DL] can be used to tackle demanding planning and scheduling problems. In particular, we investigate how to boost performance by combining distinct ASP solving techniques, such as approximations and heuristics, with preprocessing and encoding techniques for tackling large-scale, real-world train-scheduling instances.

Probabilistic logic programming is an effective formalism for encoding problems characterized by uncertainty. Some of these problems may require the optimization of probability values subject to constraints among probability distributions of random variables. Here, we introduce a new class of probabilistic logic programs, namely probabilistic optimizable logic programs, and we provide an effective algorithm to find the best assignment to probabilities of random variables, such that a set of constraints is satisfied and an objective function is optimized.

Assumption-based argumentation (ABA) is a central structured argumentation formalism. As shown recently, answer set programming (ASP) enables efficiently solving NP-hard reasoning tasks of ABA in practice, in particular in the commonly studied logic programming fragment of ABA. In this work, we harness recent advances in incremental ASP solving for developing effective algorithms for reasoning tasks in the logic programming fragment of ABA that are presumably hard for the second level of the polynomial hierarchy, including skeptical reasoning under preferred semantics as well as preferential reasoning. In particular, we develop non-trivial counterexample-guided abstraction refinement procedures based on incremental ASP solving for these tasks. We also show empirically that the procedures are significantly more effective than previously proposed algorithms for the tasks.

We present a general logical framework for reasoning about agents’ cognitive attitudes of both epistemic type and motivational type. We show that it allows us to express a variety of relevant concepts for qualitative decision theory including the concepts of knowledge, belief, strong belief, conditional belief, desire, conditional desire, strong desire, and preference. We also present two extensions of the logic, one by the notion of choice and the other by dynamic operators for belief change and desire change, and we apply the former to the analysis of single-stage games under incomplete information. We provide sound and complete axiomatizations for the basic logic and for its two extensions.

In the theory of answer set programming, two groups of rules are called strongly equivalent if, informally speaking, they have the same meaning in any context. The relationship between strong equivalence and the propositional logic of here-and-there allows us to establish strong equivalence by deriving rules of each group from rules of the other. In the process, rules are rewritten as propositional formulas. We extend this method of proving strong equivalence to an answer set programming language that includes operations on integers. The formula representing a rule in this language is a first-order formula that may contain comparison symbols among its predicate constants, and symbols for arithmetic operations among its function constants. The paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.

The importance of intuitionistic temporal logics in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence has become increasingly clear in the last few years. From the proof-theory point of view, intuitionistic temporal logics have made it possible to extend functional programming languages with new features via type theory, while from the semantics perspective, several logics for reasoning about dynamical systems and several semantics for logic programming have their roots in this framework. We consider several axiomatic systems for intuitionistic linear temporal logic and show that each of these systems is sound for a class of structures based either on Kripke frames or on dynamic topological systems. We provide two distinct interpretations of “henceforth”, both of which are natural intuitionistic variants of the classical one. We completely establish the order relation between the semantically defined logics based on both interpretations of “henceforth” and, using our soundness results, show that the axiomatically defined logics enjoy the same order relations.