Level Mapping Induced Loop Formulas for Weight Constraint and Aggregate Logic Programs

Level mapping and loop formulas are two different means to justify and characterize answer sets for normal logic programs. Both of them specify conditions under which a supported model is an answer set. Though serving a similar purpose, in the past the two have been studied largely in isolation with each other. In this paper, we study level mapping and loop formulas for weight constraint and aggregate (logic) programs. We show that, for these classes of programs, loop formulas can be devised from level mapping characterizations. First, we formulate a level mapping characterization of stable models and show that it leads to a new formulation of loop formulas for arbitrary weight constraint programs, without using any new atoms. This extends a previous result on loop formulas for weight constraint programs, where weight constraints contain only positive literals. Second, since aggregate programs are closely related to weight constraint programs, we further use level mapping to characterize the underlying answer set semantics based on which we formulate loop formulas for aggregate programs. The main result is that for aggregate programs not involving the inequality comparison operator, the dependency graphs can be built in polynomial time. This compares to the previously known exponential time method.