A Generalised Approach for Encoding and Reasoning with Qualitative
  Theories in Answer Set Programming
  Qualitative reasoning involves expressing and deriving knowledge based on
qualitative terms such as natural language expressions, rather than strict
mathematical quantities. Well over 40 qualitative calculi have been proposed so
far, mostly in the spatial and temporal domains, with several practical
applications such as naval traffic monitoring, warehouse process optimisation
and robot manipulation. Even if a number of specialised qualitative reasoning
tools have been developed so far, an important barrier to the wider adoption of
these tools is that only qualitative reasoning is supported natively, when
real-world problems most often require a combination of qualitative and other
forms of reasoning. In this work, we propose to overcome this barrier by using
ASP as a unifying formalism to tackle problems that require qualitative
reasoning in addition to non-qualitative reasoning. A family of ASP encodings
is proposed which can handle any qualitative calculus with binary relations.
These encodings are experimentally evaluated using a real-world dataset based
on a case study of determining optimal coverage of telecommunication antennas,
and compared with the performance of two well-known dedicated reasoners.
Experimental results show that the proposed encodings outperform one of the two
reasoners, but fall behind the other, an acceptable trade-off given the added
benefits of handling any type of reasoning as well as the interpretability of
logic programs. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
