Incremental Computation of Success Patterns of Logic Programs

ions, that the set of success patterns of a logic program P with respect to an abstraction α is tantamount to the success set of the equational logic program where Eα is an equality theory induced by α. Therefore, either the fixpoint semantics or the procedural semantics defined for equational logic programs can be used to compute success patterns of logic programs. From this observation, the success patterns of a logic program P can be computed by incremental refinement. A set of coarser success patterns of P relative to a stronger abstraction α1 can be obtained by computing the fixpoint semantics of the equational logic program . If the success patterns are not fine enough for the application at hand, candidates for finer success patterns relative to a weaker abstraction α2 can be generated from the coarser success patterns and verified by using either the procedural or the fixpoint semantics of equational logic program . This refinement process is repeated until success patterns are fine enough for the application. α P E 