Technical Communications of ICLP 2015. Copyright with the Authors.                        1




  Abstract Solvers for Answer Set Programming
                                     Marco Maratea
                           Universita’ degli Studi di Genova, Italy
                              (e-mail: marco@dist.unige.it)




                                         Abstract
Abstract solvers are a recently employed method to formally describe, compare and com-
bine solving algorithms, where the states of computation are represented as nodes of a
graph, the solving techniques as edges between such nodes, the solving process as a path
in the graph and the formal properties of the algorithms are reduced to related graph
properties.
   In this tutorial I overview the application of abstract solvers in Answer Set Program-
ming (ASP). After an introduction devoted to an abstract solver for SAT solving, I show
abstract solvers for ASP procedures for non-disjunctive programs; then, by building on
the resulting graphs, I move to ASP procedures for disjunctive programs. Next, abstract
solvers for cautious reasoning are presented. Finally, I briefly touch the usage of abstract
solvers in other research fields, such as Quantified SAT, Constraint ASP and Abstract
Argumentation Frameworks.