Answer Set Planning Under Action Costs

Recently, planning based on answer set programming has been proposed as an approach towards realizing declarative planning systems. In this paper, we present the language Kc, which extends the declarative planning language K by action costs. Kc provides the notion of admissible and optimal plans, which are plans whose overall action costs are within a given limit resp. minimum over all plans (i.e., cheapest plans). As we demonstrate, this novel language allows for expressing some nontrivial planning tasks in a declarative way. Furthermore, it can be utilized for representing planning problems under other optimality criteria, such as computing ``shortest'' plans (with the least number of steps), and refinement combinations of cheapest and fastest plans. We study complexity aspects of the language Kc and provide a transformation to logic programs, such that planning problems are solved via answer set programming. Furthermore, we report experimental results on selected problems. Our experience is encouraging that answer set planning may be a valuable approach to expressive planning systems in which intricate planning problems can be naturally specified and solved

12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012) : WST 2012, February 19–23, 2012, Obergurgl, Austria / ed. by Georg Moser

This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012), to be held February 19–23, 2012 in Obergurgl, Austria. The goal of the Workshop on Termination is to be a venue for presentation and discussion of all topics in and around termination. In this way, the workshop tries to bridge the gaps between different communities interested and active in research in and around termination. The 12th International Workshop on Termination in Obergurgl continues the successful workshops held in St. Andrews (1993), La Bresse (1995), Ede (1997), Dagstuhl (1999), Utrecht (2001), Valencia (2003), Aachen (2004), Seattle (2006), Paris (2007), Leipzig (2009), and Edinburgh (2010). The 12th International Workshop on Termination did welcome contributions on all aspects of termination and complexity analysis. Contributions from the imperative, constraint, functional, and logic programming communities, and papers investigating applications of complexity or termination (for example in program transformation or theorem proving) were particularly welcome. We did receive 18 submissions which all were accepted. Each paper was assigned two reviewers. In addition to these 18 contributed talks, WST 2012, hosts three invited talks by Alexander Krauss, Martin Hofmann, and Fausto Spoto

Work Analysis with Resource-Aware Session Types

While there exist several successful techniques for supporting programmers in deriving static resource bounds for sequential code, analyzing the resource usage of message-passing concurrent processes poses additional challenges. To meet these challenges, this article presents an analysis for statically deriving worst-case bounds on the total work performed by message-passing processes. To decompose interacting processes into components that can be analyzed in isolation, the analysis is based on novel resource-aware session types, which describe protocols and resource contracts for inter-process communication. A key innovation is that both messages and processes carry potential to share and amortize cost while communicating. To symbolically express resource usage in a setting without static data structures and intrinsic sizes, resource contracts describe bounds that are functions of interactions between processes. Resource-aware session types combine standard binary session types and type-based amortized resource analysis in a linear type system. This type system is formulated for a core session-type calculus of the language SILL and proved sound with respect to a multiset-based operational cost semantics that tracks the total number of messages that are exchanged in a system. The effectiveness of the analysis is demonstrated by analyzing standard examples from amortized analysis and the literature on session types and by a comparative performance analysis of different concurrent programs implementing the same interface.Comment: 25 pages, 2 pages of references, 11 pages of appendix, Accepted at LICS 201

Optimal Union-Find in Constraint Handling Rules

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a committed-choice rule-based language that was originally intended for writing constraint solvers. In this paper we show that it is also possible to write the classic union-find algorithm and variants in CHR. The programs neither compromise in declarativeness nor efficiency. We study the time complexity of our programs: they match the almost-linear complexity of the best known imperative implementations. This fact is illustrated with experimental results.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

CHR Grammars

A grammar formalism based upon CHR is proposed analogously to the way Definite Clause Grammars are defined and implemented on top of Prolog. These grammars execute as robust bottom-up parsers with an inherent treatment of ambiguity and a high flexibility to model various linguistic phenomena. The formalism extends previous logic programming based grammars with a form of context-sensitive rules and the possibility to include extra-grammatical hypotheses in both head and body of grammar rules. Among the applications are straightforward implementations of Assumption Grammars and abduction under integrity constraints for language analysis. CHR grammars appear as a powerful tool for specification and implementation of language processors and may be proposed as a new standard for bottom-up grammars in logic programming. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), 2005Comment: 36 pp. To appear in TPLP, 200