Answer Set Programming is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming with close relationship with other declarative modelling paradigms and languages such as SAT Modulo Theories, Constraint Handling Rules, FO(.), PDDL and many others.

Since the first informal editions (Dagstuhl 2002 and 2005), ASP systems compete in the nowaday customary ASP Competition: the Third ASP Competition will take place at the University of Calabria (Italy) in the first half of 2011. It is the sequel to the ASP Competitions Series, held at the Universitaet Potsdam in Germany (2006-2007) and at the University of Leuven in Belgium in 2009. The current competition is held jointly with the 11th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR-11) where the results will be published.

The formula of the event is open to ASP systems and any other system based on a declarative specification paradigm. Participant will compete on a selected collection of benchmark problems, declarative specifications and instances thereof. Before the application of competitor systems, there will be a problem selection stage, in which participants and interested researchers will be able to submit problem specifications; these will be then selected by the Organizing Committee, after an informal review and discussion stage.

The contribution to the competition is strongly encouraged and can be of two forms:

1. design and submission of new benchmarks, and

2. participation of teams and submission of systems.

The benchmark submission procedure is regulated in the separate { Call For Problems} document . The detailed rules for participating to the final stage of the competition can be found in the { Competition Rules} document.