Abstract solvers for Dung's argumentation frameworks

Solvers are a quite recent method to uniformly describe algorithms in a rigorous formal way via graphs. Compared to traditional methods like pseudo-code descriptions, abstract solvers have several advantages. In particular, they provide a uniform formal representation that allows for precise comparisons of different algorithms. Recently, this new methodology has proven successful in declarative paradigms such as Propositional Satisfiability and Answer Set Programming. In this paper, we apply this machinery to Dung's abstract argumentation frameworks. We first provide descriptions of several advanced algorithms for the preferred semantics in terms of abstract solvers. We also show how it is possible to obtain new abstract solutions by "combining" concepts of existing algorithms by means of combining abstract solvers. Then, we implemented a new solving procedure based on our findings in cegartix, and call it cegartix+. We finally show that cegartix+ is competitive and complementary in its performance to cegartix on benchmarks of the first and second argumentation competition.