LoCo—A Logic for Configuration Problems

Abstract

In this work, we present LoCo, a fragment of classical first-order logic carefully tailored for expressing technical product configuration problems. The core feature of LoCo is that the number of components used in configurations does not have to be finitely bounded explicitly, but instead is bounded implicitly through the axioms. Computing configurations is equivalent to the task of model finding. We present the language, related algorithms, and complexity results as well as a prototypical implementation via answer set programming.