Characterizations of Decomposable Dependency Models

Decomposable dependency models possess a number of interesting and useful properties. This paper presents new characterizations of decomposable models in terms of independence relationships, which are obtained by adding a single axiom to the well-known set characterizing dependency models that are isomorphic to undirected graphs. We also briefly discuss a potential application of our results to the problem of learning graphical models from data.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Parametric Connectives in Disjunctive Logic Programming

Disjunctive Logic Programming (\DLP) is an advanced formalism for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). \DLP is very expressive in a precise mathematical sense: it allows to express every property of finite structures that is decidable in the complexity class \SigmaP{2} (\NP^{\NP}). Importantly, the \DLP encodings are often simple and natural. In this paper, we single out some limitations of \DLP for KRR, which cannot naturally express problems where the size of the disjunction is not known ``a priori'' (like N-Coloring), but it is part of the input. To overcome these limitations, we further enhance the knowledge modelling abilities of \DLP, by extending this language by {\em Parametric Connectives (OR and AND)}. These connectives allow us to represent compactly the disjunction/conjunction of a set of atoms having a given property. We formally define the semantics of the new language, named $DLP^{\bigvee,\bigwedge}$ and we show the usefulness of the new constructs on relevant knowledge-based problems. We address implementation issues and discuss related works

An efficient projector-based passivity test for descriptor systems

An efficient passivity test based on canonical projector techniques is proposed for descriptor systems (DSs) widely encountered in circuit and system modeling. The test features a natural flow that first evaluates the index of a DS, followed by possible decoupling into its proper and improper subsystems. Explicit state-space formulations for respective subsystems are derived to facilitate further processing such as model order reduction and/or passivity enforcement. Efficient projector construction and a fast generalized Hamiltonian test for the proper-part passivity are also elaborated. Numerical examples then confirm the superiority of the proposed method over existing passivity tests for DSs based on linear matrix inequalities or skew-Hamiltonian/Hamiltonian matrix pencils. © 2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Elimination of spatial connectives in static spatial logics

AbstractThe recent interest for specification on resources yields so-called spatial logics, that is specification languages offering new forms of reasoning: the local reasoning through the separation of the resource space into two disjoint subspaces, and the contextual reasoning through hypothetical extension of the resource space.We consider two resource models and their related logics:•The static ambient model, proposed as an abstraction of semistructured data (Proc. ESOP’01, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2028, Springer, Berlin, 2001, pp. 1–22 (invited paper)) with the static ambient logic (SAL) that was proposed as a request language, both obtained by restricting the mobile ambient calculus (Proc. FOSSACS’98, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1378, Springer, Berlin, 1998, pp. 140–155) and logic (Proc. POPL’00, ACM Press, New York, 2000, pp. 365–377) to their purely static aspects.•The memory model and the assertion language of separation logic, both defined in Reynolds (Proc. LICS’02, 2002) for the purpose of the axiomatic semantic of imperative programs manipulating pointers.We raise the questions of the expressiveness and the minimality of these logics. Our main contribution is a minimalisation technique we may apply for these two logics. We moreover show some restrictions of this technique for the extension SAL∀ with universal quantification, and we establish the minimality of the adjunct-free fragment (SALint)

Effectively Solving NP-SPEC Encodings by Translation to ASP

NP-SPEC is a language for specifying problems in NP in a declarative way. Despite the fact that the semantics of the language was given by referring to Datalog with circumscription, which is very close to ASP, so far the only existing implementations are by means of ECLiPSe Prolog and via Boolean satisfiability solvers. In this paper, we present translations from NP-SPEC into ASP, and provide an experimental evaluation of existing implementations and the proposed translations to ASP using various ASP solvers. The results show that translating to ASP clearly has an edge over the existing translation into SAT, which involves an intrinsic grounding process. We also argue that it might be useful to incorporate certain language constructs of NPSPEC into mainstream ASP