The Design of the Sixth Answer Set Programming Competition – Report –

Abstract. Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-known paradigm of declar-ative programming with roots in logic programming and non-monotonic rea-soning. Similar to other closely-related problem-solving technologies, such as SAT/SMT, QBF, Planning and Scheduling, advances in ASP solving are as-sessed in competition events. In this paper, we report about the design of the Sixth ASP Competition, which is jointly organized by the University of Cal-abria (Italy), Aalto University (Finland), and the University of Genova (Italy), in affiliation with the 13th International Conference on Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 2015). This edition maintains some of the design decisions introduced in the last event, e.g., the design of tracks, the scor-ing scheme, and the adherence to a fixed modeling language in order to push the adoption of the ASP-Core-2 standard. On the other hand, it features also some novelties, like a benchmarks selection stage to classify instances according to their expected hardness, and a “marathon ” track where the best performing sys-tems are given more time for solving hard benchmarks