Using Rules of Thumb for Repairing Inconsistent Answer Set Programs

Answer set programming is a form of declarative programming that can be used to elegantly model various systems. When the available knowledge about these systems is imperfect, however, the resulting programs can be inconsistent. In such cases, it is of interest to find plausible repairs, i.e. plausible modifications to the original program that ensure the existence of at least one answer set. Although several approaches to this end have already been proposed, most of them merely find a repair which is in some sense minimal. In many applications, however, expert knowledge is available which could allow us to identify better repairs. In this paper, we analyze the potential of using expert knowledge in this way, by focusing on a specific case study: gene regulatory networks. We show how we can identify the repairs that best agree with insights about such networks that have been reported in the literature, and experimentally compare this strategy against the baseline strategy of identifying minimal repairs.