TY - JOUR
T1 - A Generalised Approach for Encoding and Reasoning with Qualitative Theories in Answer Set Programming
AU - Baryannis, George
AU - Tachmazidis, Ilias
AU - Batsakis, Sotiris
AU - Antoniou, Grigoris
AU - Alviano, Mario
AU - Papadakis, Emmanuel
N1 - Conference code: 36
PY - 2020/9/1
Y1 - 2020/9/1
N2 - Qualitative reasoning involves expressing and deriving knowledge based on qualitative terms such as natural language expressions, rather than strict mathematical quantities. Well over 40 qualitative calculi have been proposed so far, mostly in the spatial and temporal domains, with several practical applications such as naval traffic monitoring, warehouse process optimisation and robot manipulation. Even if a number of specialised qualitative reasoning tools have been developed so far, an important barrier to the wider adoption of these tools is that only qualitative reasoning is supported natively, when real-world problems most often require a combination of qualitative and other forms of reasoning. In this work, we propose to overcome this barrier by using ASP as a unifying formalism to tackle problems that require qualitative reasoning in addition to non-qualitative reasoning. A family of ASP encodings is proposed which can handle any qualitativecalculus with binary relations. These encodings are experimentally evaluated using a real-world dataset based on a case study of determining optimal coverage of telecommunication antennas, and compared with the performance of two well-known dedicated reasoners. Experimental results show that the proposed encodings outperform one of the two reasoners, but fall behind the other, an acceptable trade-off given the added benefits of handling any type of reasoning as well as the interpretability of logic programs.
AB - Qualitative reasoning involves expressing and deriving knowledge based on qualitative terms such as natural language expressions, rather than strict mathematical quantities. Well over 40 qualitative calculi have been proposed so far, mostly in the spatial and temporal domains, with several practical applications such as naval traffic monitoring, warehouse process optimisation and robot manipulation. Even if a number of specialised qualitative reasoning tools have been developed so far, an important barrier to the wider adoption of these tools is that only qualitative reasoning is supported natively, when real-world problems most often require a combination of qualitative and other forms of reasoning. In this work, we propose to overcome this barrier by using ASP as a unifying formalism to tackle problems that require qualitative reasoning in addition to non-qualitative reasoning. A family of ASP encodings is proposed which can handle any qualitativecalculus with binary relations. These encodings are experimentally evaluated using a real-world dataset based on a case study of determining optimal coverage of telecommunication antennas, and compared with the performance of two well-known dedicated reasoners. Experimental results show that the proposed encodings outperform one of the two reasoners, but fall behind the other, an acceptable trade-off given the added benefits of handling any type of reasoning as well as the interpretability of logic programs.
KW - Answer Set Programming
KW - Qualitative Calculus
KW - Qualitative Reasoning
KW - Spatial Reasoning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092007085&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S1471068420000198
DO - 10.1017/S1471068420000198
M3 - Article
VL - 20
SP - 687
EP - 702
JO - Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
JF - Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
SN - 1471-0684
IS - 5
T2 - 36th International Conference on Logic Programming
Y2 - 18 September 2020 through 25 September 2020
ER -