Enhancing Answer Set Programming with Templates

The work aims at extending Answer Set Programming (ASP) with the possibility of quickly introducing new predefined constructs and to deal with compound data structures: we show how ASP can be extended with ‘template’ predicate’s definitions. We present language syntax and give its operational semantics. We show that the theory supporting our ASP extension is sound, and that program encodings are evaluated as efficiently as ASP programs. Examples show how the extended language increases declarativity, readability, compactness of program encodings and code reusability.