The Third Answer Set Programming Competition: Preliminary Report of the System Competition Track

Answer Set Programming is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming in close relationship with other declarative formalisms such as SAT Modulo Theories, Constraint Handling Rules, FO(.), PDDL and many others. Since its first informal editions, ASP systems are compared in the nowadays customary ASP Competition. The Third ASP Competition, as the sequel to the ASP Competitions Series held at the University of Potsdam in Germany (2006-2007) and at the University of Leuven in Belgium in 2009, took place at the University of Calabria (Italy) in the first half of 2011. Participants competed on a selected collection of declarative specifications of benchmark problems, taken from a variety of domains as well as real world applications, and instances thereof. The Competition ran on two tracks: the Model & Solve Competition, held on an open problem encoding, on an open language basis, and open to any kind of system based on a declarative specification paradigm; and the System Competition, held on the basis of fixed, public problem encodings, written in a standard ASP language. This paper briefly discuss the format and rationale of the System competition track, and preliminarily reports its results.