Solving Modular Model Expansion Tasks

Abstract: The work we describe here is a part of a research program of developing foundations of declarative solving of search problems. We consider the model expansion task as the task representing the essence of search problems where we are given an instance of a problem and are searching for a solution satisfying certain properties. Such tasks are common in artificial intelligence, formal verification, computational biology. Recently, the model expansion framework was extended to deal with multiple modules. In the current paper, inspired by practical combined solvers, we introduce an algorithm to solve model expansion tasks for modular systems. We show that our algorithm closely corresponds to what is done in practice in different areas such as Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), Integer Linear Programming (ILP), Answer Set Programming (ASP).