Tractable Answer-Set Programming with Weight Constraints: Bounded Treewidth is not Enough

Reinhard Pichler, Stefan Rümmele, Stefan Szeider and Stefan Woltran

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, FirstView Article, July 2012, pp. 1-24.

A preliminary version appeared in the proceedings of KR 2010, Twelfth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Toronto, Canada, May 9-13, 2010, AAAI Press 2010.

Abstract:

Cardinality constraints or, more generally, weight constraints are well recognized as an important extension of answer-set programming. Clearly, all common algorithmic tasks related to programs with cardinality or weight constraints (PWCs) — like checking the consistency of a program — are intractable. Many intractable problems in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning have been shown to become tractable if the treewidth of the programs or formulas under consideration is bounded by some constant. The goal of this paper is to apply the notion of treewidth to PWCs and to identify tractable fragments. It will turn out that the straightforward application of treewidth to PWCs does not suffice to obtain tractability. However, by imposing further restrictions, tractability can be achieved.

The main results of this paper are as follows:
  • We first show that the consistency problem of PWCs remains NP-complete even if the treewidth of the considered programs is bounded by a constant.
  • If additionally the upper bounds on the weights are given in unary representation, we obtain a non-uniform polynomial time upper bound by designing an appropriate dynamic programming algorithm.
  • Finally, if also the upper bounds on the weights are bounded by a constant, we can show that the consistency problem becomes solvable in linear time.


The final version is available from [arXiv:1204.3040]