EZCSP

Association

Eastman Kodak Company
University of Kentucky

Description

Our team was interested in evaluating and comparing cutting-edge ASP and hybrid languages and solvers on challenging, industrial-sized domains. As the “core” solver we used ezcsp, which would run underlying solvers as needed.
Ezcsp is a language and solver featuring a lightweight integration of Answer Set Programming (ASP) and Constraint Programming (CP). The integration is such that different ASP and CP solvers can be freely selected according to the features of the domain. Another distinctive feature of ezcsp over similar solvers is that it supports the use of global constraints, if they are available in the CP solver selected.
Depending on the benchmark, as underlying ASP solver we used clasp, iclingo, ASPM (M.Balduccini, “A General Method To Solve Complex Problems By Combining Multiple Answer Set Programs”, in ICLP09 Workshop on Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP09), 2009). For every encoding where CP constraints were used, we compared the performance of B-Prolog and Sicstus Prolog, which was straightforward because of the interchangeability of solvers in ezcsp. We ended up selecting B-Prolog in each case because of its more consistent performance.

Participants

• Marcello Balduccini
• Selim Erdogan
• Yulia Lierler

System Settings

All the underlying solvers were used with default settings. The following table shows which underlying solver(s) were used for each benchmark.