FastFound: Easing the ASP Bottleneck via Predicate-Decoupled Grounding
Alexander Beiser, Martin Gebser, Markus Hecher, Stefan Woltran · 2025
The grounding bottleneck in Answer Set Programming prohibits large instances from being solved. This is caused by a combinatorial explosion in the grounding phase of standard ground&solve systems. A promising alternative is Body-Decoupled Grounding (BDG), which grounds each body predicate on its own. However, BDG faces challenges in terms of worst-case grounding size and limited interoperability with other systems. This paper addresses shortcomings of BDG by introducing FastFound: an alternative foundedness check that significantly reduces grounding sizes, by grounding each predicate on its own. FastFound’s foundedness check is done implicitly, which leads to a quadratic reduction in grounding size. We start by introducing FastFound for tight normal rules, where we observe that this cannot be substantially improved. Then we extend FastFound to head-cycle-free programs and give novel interoperability results for full disjunctive programs. An experimental evaluation on our prototype shows promising results, as we solve more grounding-heavy tasks than both standard ground&solve systems and BDG.