Head-Elementary-Set-Free Logic Programs - uni-potsdam.de.pdfVIP

Head-Elementary-Set-Free Logic Programs 1 2 3 Martin Gebser , Joohyung Lee , and Yuliya Lierler 1 Institut f¨ur Informatik, Universit¨at Potsdam, Germany 2 School of Computing and Informatics, Arizona State University, USA 3 Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, USA gebser@cs.uni-potsdam.de,joolee@,yuliya@ Abstract. The recently proposed notion of an elementary set yielded a refine- ment of the theorem on loop formulas, telling us that the stable models of a disjunctive logic program can be characterized by the loop formulas of its ele- mentary sets. Based on the notion of an elementary set, we propose the notion of head-elementary-set-free (HEF) programs, a more general class of disjunctive programs than head-cycle-free (HCF) programs proposed by Ben-Eliyahu and Dechter, that can still be turned into nondisjunctive programs in polynomial time and space by ”shifting” the head atoms into the body. We show several prop- erties of HEF programs that generalize earlier results on HCF programs. Given an HEF program, we provide an algorithm for finding an elementary set whose loop formula is not satisfied, which has a potential for improving stable model computation by answer set solvers. 1 Introduction Disjunctive logic programs under the stable model semantics are more expressive than nondisjunctive programs. The problem of deciding whether a disjunctive program has a stable model is ΣP -complete [1], while the same problem for a nondisjunctive program 2 is NP-complete. However, Ben-Eliyahu and Dechter [2] showed that a class of disjunctive programs called “head-cycle-free (HCF)” programs can be turned into no