A simple distributed conflict-driven answer set solver

Abstract. We propose an approach to distributed Answer Set Solving based on Message Passing. Our approach aims at taking advantage of modern ASP solvers rather than proposing a genuine yet involved parallel ASP solver. To this end, we rely upon a simple master-worker architecture in which each worker amounts to an off-the-shelf ASP solver augmented with a separate communication module being only lightly connected to the actual solver. The overall communication is driven by the workers ’ communication modules, which asynchronously exchange messages with the master. We have implemented our approach and report upon an empirical study demonstrating its computational impact.