Enhancing Compilation-based ASP Solving with Postponed Atom Discovery

Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems following the Ground&Solve approach are affected by the grounding bottleneck problem, where the grounding phase can cause a combinatorial explosion in program size, making solving unfeasible. Compilation-based ASP solving addresses this by simulating rule inferences through ad hoc propagators, avoiding the grounding phase. However, existing approaches require all propositional atoms to be computed upfront, resulting in overhead as the number of generated atoms grows. In this paper, we investigate how compilation-based technique can be enhanced by deferring the evaluation of rules generating large number of atoms, and so enabling atoms to be discovered lazily during solving. Preliminary results demonstrate significant performance improvements over traditional compilation-based solvers.