JWASP: A new Java-based ASP solver

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-known declarative programming language for knowledge representation and non-monotonic reasoning. ASP solvers are usually written in C/C++ with the aim of extremely optimizing their performance. Indeed, C/C++ allow for several low level optimizations, which however come at the price of a less portable implementation. This is a problem for some real world use cases which do not actually require an extremely efficient computation, but would benefit from platform-independent and easilydeployable implementation. Motivated by such use cases, we develop JWASP, a new ASP solver written in Java and extending the open source library SAT4J in order to process ASP programs with atomic heads. We also report on a preliminary experiment assessing the performance of JWASP, whose results are encouraging: JWASP is a good candidate as an alternative ASP solver for platform-independent applications, which cannot rely on current ASP solvers.