Simple, Efficient and Scalable Groundness Analysis of Logic Programs

Andy Heaton, Muhamed Abo-Zaed, Michael Codish and Andy King

The Journal of Logic Programming; 45 (1-3): 143-156, 2000

Abstract:

The domain of positive Boolean functions, Pos, is by now well established for the analysis of the variable dependencies that arise within logic programs. Analyses based on Pos that use binary decision diagrams have been shown to be efficient for a wide range of practical programs. However, independent of the representation, a Pos analysis can never come with any efficiency guarantees because of its potential exponential behaviour. This paper considers groundness analysis based on a linear subdomain of Pos. We base a goal-dependent groundness analysis for logic programs on this subdomain, and show that the resulting precision compares very favourably with that of Pos analysis.

Available: bibtex entry compressed postscript

Michael Codish
The Department of Computer Science
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
PoB 653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel
mcodish@cs.bgu.ac.il