Body-Decoupled Grounding via Solving: A Novel Approach on the ASP Bottleneck

Answer-Set Programming (ASP) has seen tremendous progress over the last two decades and is nowadays successfully applied in many real-world domains. However, for certain types of problems, the well-known ASP grounding bottleneck still causes severe problems. This becomes virulent when grounding of rules, where the variables have to be replaced by constants, leads to a ground pro- gram that is too huge to be processed by the ASP solver. In this work, we tackle this problem by a novel method that decouples non-ground atoms in rules in order to delegate the evaluation of rule bodies to the solving process. Our procedure translates a non-ground normal program into a ground disjunctive program that is exponential only in the maximum predicate arity, and thus polynomial if this arity is assumed to be bounded by a constant. We demonstrate the feasibility of this new method experimentally by comparing it to standard ASP technology in terms of grounding size, grounding time and total runtime.