Strategic Companies

Problem Description

Strategic companies is a well-known NP^NP-complete problem that has often been used for systems comparisons, and also in the previous ASP Competitions.

In the Strategic Companies problem, a collection

• C = c₁, ..., c_m

of companies is given, for some m>=1. Each company produces some goods in a set G, and each company c_i in C is possibly controlled by a set of owner companies O_i (where O_i is a subset of C, for each i=1,...,m). In this context, a set C' of companies (i.e., a subset of C) is a "strategic set" if it is minimal among all the sets satisfying the following conditions:

• Companies in C' produce all goods in G;

• If O_i is a subset of C', the associated company c_i must belong to C'(for each i=1,...,m).
  

In our setting, instances are subject to two additional restrictions:

1. each product is produced by at most four companies; and

2. each company is controlled by at most four companies.
   

Under these restrictions the problem is still NP^NP-complete.
Instances of strategic companies are encoded by means of the predicates produced_by and controlled_by. In particular, there is a fact producedBy(p,c1,c2,c3,c4) when a product p is produced by companies c1, c2, c3 and c4, and a fact controlledBy(c,c1,c2,c3,c4) when a company c is controlled by companies c1, c2, c3 and c4. If a product p is produced by less than four companies (but at least one), the atom produced_by(p,c_a,c_b,c_c,c_d) contains repetitions of companies. For instance, producedBy(p,c_a,c_b,c_c,c_c) is used for representing that p is produced solely by c_a, c_b and c_c. Analogously, if a company c is controlled by less than four companies.

The goal of the problem is a follows: given two distinct companies c_i,c_j in C, we ask for checking the existence of a strategic set C' such that c_i and c_j occur in C'.

Predicates

• Input: produced_by/5, controlled_by/5, strategic_pair/2

• Output: strategic/1

Input format

An instance of Strategic Companies is modeled by the following facts that will be provided in the input file:

• - A set of facts of the form produced_by(p,c1,c2,c3,c4), where produced_by(p,c1,c2,c3,c4) means that product P is produced by companies c1, c2, c3 and c4;

  - A set of facts of the form controlled_by(c,c1,c2,c3,c4), where controlled_by(c,c1,c2,c3,c4) means that company c is jointly controlled by c1, c2, c3 and c4;

  - A ground fact of the form strategic_pair(c1,c2), specifying the query goal: is there a strategic set containing both c1 and c2?

For instance:

produced_by(pasta,barilla,amato,dececco,divella). produced_by(tonno,callipo,star,almera,asdomar).
controlled_by(callipo,star,almera,asdomar,barilla). controlled_by(barilla,callipo,almera,dececco,star). 
strategic_pair(callipo,barilla).

Output format

For strategic_pair(c1,c2) in input, if c1 and c2 jointly belong to a minimal strategic set, the output must contain a number of ground atoms of the form strategic(c_i) (where "strategic(c_i)" stands for "company c_i is strategic") encoding the minimal strategic set which c1 and c2 belong to.

Example(s)

Notes

Note that this is a search problem, despite the seemingly presence of a query in input.

Author(s)

• Author: Mario Alviano
  • Affiliation: University of Calabria, Italy
• Author: Marco Maratea
  • Affiliation: University of Genova
• Author: Francesco Ricca
  • Affiliation: University of Calabria, Italy