Answer Set Searching with Weighted MaxSAT

This paper proposes a new non-native solver for Answer Set Programming (ASP) named maxmodels. It is based on translating logic normal programs into weighted MaxSAT clauses. We checked our proposal’s computational efficiency in the series of experiments on selected NP-hard optimization problems against the state-of-the-art ASP solvers dlv, clingo, and smodels. Our findings indicate that maxmodels outperforms other solvers in certain problems while also being competitive in others.