A revised concept of safety for general answer set programs

Abstract

To ensure a close relation between the answer sets of a program and those of its ground version, some answer set solvers deal with variables by requiring a safety condition on program rules. If we go beyond the syntax of disjunctive programs, for instance by allowing rules with nested expressions, or perhaps even arbitrary first-order formulas, new definitions of safety are required. In this paper we consider a new concept of safety for formulas in quantified equilibrium logic where answer sets can be defined for arbitrary first-order formulas. The new concept captures and generalises two recently proposed safety definitions: that of Lee, Lifschitz and Palla (2008) as well as that of Bria, Faber and Leone (2008). We study the main metalogical properties of safe formulas. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.