Enrico Pontelli

Parallel execution of prolog programs: a survey

Since the early days of logic programming, researchers in the field realized the potential for exploitation of parallelism present in the execution of logic programs. Their high-level nature, the presence of nondeterminism, and their referential transparency, among other characteristics, make logic programs interesting candidates for obtaining speedups through parallel execution. At the same time, the fact that the typical applications of logic programming frequently involve irregular computations, make heavy use of dynamic data structures with logical variables, and involve search and speculation, makes the techniques used in the corresponding parallelizing compilers and run-time systems potentially interesting even outside the field. The objective of this article is to provide a comprehensive survey of the issues arising in parallel execution of logic programming languages along with the most relevant approaches explored to date in the field. Focus is mostly given to the challenges emerging from the parallel execution of Prolog programs. The article describes the major techniques used for shared memory implementation of Or-parallelism, And-parallelism, and combinations of the two. We also explore some related issues, such as memory management, compile-time analysis, and execution visualization.

Planning with preferences using logic programming

We present a declarative language,

A Constructive semantic characterization of aggregates in answer set programming

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A constraint-based approach for specification and verification of real-time systems

, for the high-level specification of preferences between possible solutions (or trajectories) of a planning problem. This novel language allows users to elegantly express non-trivial, multi-dimensional preferences and priorities over such preferences. The semantics of

Justifications for logic programs under answer set semantics

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IDENTIFICATION OF α-HELICES FROM LOW RESOLUTION PROTEIN DENSITY MAPS

allows the identification of most preferred trajectories for a given goal. We also provide an answer set programming implementation of planning problems with

&ACE: a high-performance parallel Prolog system

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Navigation of HTML tables, frames, and XML fragments

preferences.

Logic programs with abstract constraint atoms: The role of computations

This technical note describes a monotone and continuous fixpoint operator to compute the answer sets of programs with aggregates. The fixpoint operator relies on the notion of aggregate solution. Under certain conditions, this operator behaves identically to the three-valued immediate consequence operator PaggrP for aggregate programs, independently proposed in Pelov (2004) and Pelov et al. (2004). This operator allows us to closely tie the computational complexity of the answer set checking and answer sets existence problems to the cost of checking a solution of the aggregates in the program. Finally, we relate the semantics described by the operator to other proposals for logic programming with aggregates.

A comparison of CLP(FD) and ASP solutions to NP-Complete problems

We develop a general constraint logic programming (CLP) based framework for specification and verification of real time systems. Our framework is based on the notion of timed automata that have traditionally been used for specifying real time systems. In our framework, a user models the ordering of real time events as the grammar of a language accepted by a timed automata, the real time constraints on these events are then captured as denotations of the grammar productions specified by the user. The grammar can be specified as a Definite Clause Grammar (DCG), while the denotations can be specified in constraint logic. The resulting specification can hence be regarded as a constraint logic program (CLP), and is executable. Many interesting properties of the real time system can be verified by posing appropriate queries to this CLP program. A major advantage of our approach is that it is constructive in nature, i.e., it can be used for computing the conditions under which a property will hold for a given real time system. Our framework also suggests new types of formalisms that we call constraint automata and timed push down automata.