P-stable models of strong kernel programs

Currently non-monotonic reasoning (NMR) is a promising approach to model features of common sense reasoning. In order to formalize NMR the research community has applied monotonic logics. The present paper furthers the study of one of the semantics useful in this formalization called p-stable. We introduce three different formats for normal programs: Negative normal programs, Restricted negative normal programs and Strong kernel programs. This forms helps to simplify the search of p-stable models of the original program. One of the main results of this paper indicates that the p-stable semantics for strong-kernel programs agrees with the stable semantics for kernel programs as defined in [2]. In this way all the applications based on stable semantics of kernel programs can also be based on p-stable semantics of strong kernel programs.