Guarded Open Answer Set Programming

Open answer set programming (OASP) is an extension of answer set programming where one may ground a program with an arbitrary superset of the program’s constants. We define a fixed point logic (FPL) extension of Clark’s completion such that open answer sets correspond to models of FPL formulas and identify a syntactic subclass of programs, called (loosely) guarded programs. Whereas reasoning with general programs in OASP is undecidable, the FPL translation of (loosely) guarded programs falls in the decidable (loosely) guarded fixed point logic (μ(L)GF). Moreover, we reduce normal closed ASP to loosely guarded OASP, enabling a characterization of an answer set semantics by μLGF formulas. Finally, we relate guarded OASP to Datalog LITE, thus linking an answer set semantics to a semantics based on fixed point models of extended stratified Datalog programs. From this correspondence, we deduce 2-EXPTIME-completeness of satisfiability checking w.r.t. (loosely) guarded programs.