Optimality-preserving Logic-Based Benders Decomposition of Answer Set Programs
Optimality-preserving Logic-Based Benders Decomposition of Answer Set Programs
Carmine Dodaro, Antonio Ielo, Marco Maratea, Cinzia Marte, Alice Tarzariol
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3810-3818.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/424
Bender Decomposition is a well-known solving technique in Operation Research that decomposes a problem into a master and a subproblem, which interact via “cuts". This technique has been extended to Logic-Based Bender Decomposition (LBBD), solving problems specified by logic-based languages and enabling a wider applicability. However, while Bender Decomposition guarantees optimality, LBBD does not: this property is problem-specific and depends on the defined decomposition and cuts.
In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of the conditions under which LBBD, including cuts, can preserve optimality in the context of Answer Set Programming (ASP), a prominent logic-based language in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
We also introduce a general-purpose algorithm that employs both minimal unsatisfiable subsets and minimal correction subsets to define cuts in a fully automated, problem-independent way. The algorithm preserves the optimality guarantees of Bender Decomposition.
An empirical evaluation on real-world scheduling instances shows that our approach can find significantly more solutions, and more optimal ones, compared to a standard direct ASP encoding, while also consistently reducing the execution time.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Logic programming
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Non-monotonic reasoning
