On the Minimality of Stable Models

• Published in: Logic Programming, Knowledge Representation, and Nonmonotonic Reasoning pp. 64 - 73
• Main Authors: Ferraris, Paolo, Lifschitz, Vladimir
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2011
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 3642208312; 9783642208317
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20832-4_5

The class of logic programs covered by the original definition of a stable model has the property that all stable models of a program in this class are minimal. In the course of research on answer set programming, the concept of a stable model was extended to several new programming constructs, and for some of these extensions the minimality property does not hold. We are interested in syntactic conditions on a logic program that guarantee the minimality of its stable models. This question is addressed here in the context of the general theory of stable models of first-order sentences.