A Modular, Polynomial Time Method for Eliminating Weight Constraints

Weight constraints represent an extension of logic programs under the answer set semantics that is essential for many applications to knowledge representation. The relation of this extension to the original semantics is an important topic. It has been proved that there exists a modular algorithm for eliminating weight constraints that is guaranteed to terminate in polynomial time under the assumption of a constant upper bound on the weights occurring in the program. In this paper we show that the statement of the theorem is true even without this assumption.