Debugging ASP programs by means of ASP

Answer-set programming (ASP) has become an important paradigm for declarative problem solving in recent years. However, to further improve the usability of answer-set programs, the development of software-engineering tools is vital. In particular, the area of debugging provides a challenge in both theoretical and practical terms. This is due to the purely declarative nature of ASP that, on the one hand, calls for solver-independent methodologies and, on the other hand, does not directly apply to tracing techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology, which rests within ASP itself, to sort out errors on the conceptual level. Our method makes use of tagging, where the program to be analyzed is rewritten using dedicated control atoms. This provides a flexible way to specify different types of debugging requests and a first step towards a dedicated (meta level) debugging language.