Answer set programming: Language, applications and development tools

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a powerful language for knowledge representation and reasoning, that has been developed in the field of nonmonotonic reasoning and logic programming. The high knowledge-modeling power of ASP, together with the availability of efficient ASP systems, have implied a renewed interest in this formalism in recent years. ASP has been applied in many scientific applications, ranging from Artificial Intelligence, to Knowledge Management and Information Integration. The big challenge now is to show that ASP can be profitably used for real-world applications, and can attract much interest also in industry. In this paper, we report on our on-the-field experience on the development of real-world applications in ASP. We have employed the DLV system, the first ASP system which is undergoing an industrial exploitation by a spin-off company, and is very well-suited for applications development, thanks also to the endowment of powerful development tools, supporting the activities of researchers and implementors. In particular, we describe a couple of real-world ASP applications for work-force management and e-tourism, and we focus on two advanced development tools for DLV: ASPIDE and JDLV. ASPIDE is an extensible integrated development environment for ASP; while JDLV is a plug-in for Eclipse, integrating ASP in a well-assessed development platform which enables a bilateral interaction between ASP and Java. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.