Researcher profile

Marco Maratea

Marco Maratea contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate

Trust snapshot

Quick read

Trust 21 - EmergingVerification L1Unclaimed author
10works
0followers
3topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Decide how to stay connected

Follow researcher0

Identity and collaboration

How to connect with this researcher

Claiming links this public author record to a researcher profile and unlocks direct collaboration workflows.

Log in to claim

Direct collaboration

Open a focused conversation when the fit is right

Claim this author entity first to unlock direct invitations.

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent work, topics, institutions and collaborators without jumping out to a separate graph page.

Building this graph slice

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

10 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Long-term Power Grid Planning via Answer Set Programming

The Power grid is a critical infrastructure underpinning all aspects of modern society and its services. Maintaining its effectiveness requires continuous adaptations. In particular, addressing sustainability targets, demand patterns, and urbanisation trends requires implementing changes to the network. Actual developments can potentially span over a decade, with supply continuity and service quality that must be preserved throughout by ensuring conformance to several topological and combinatorial invariants. Long-term power grid planning deals with the above process, and although planning languages could be a natural choice, the kind of properties and invariants needed are cumbersome to express in such languages; on the contrary, they can be elegantly and succinctly encoded in Answer Set Programming (ASP). In this paper, we propose the first approach to automate and optimise the long-term power grid planning process using ASP. Experimental evaluations conducted on synthetic and real-world grid data confirm the expressive power of the proposed ASP-based approach and demonstrate its effectiveness.

preprint2025arXiv

A CASP-based Solution for Traffic Signal Optimisation

In the context of urban traffic control, traffic signal optimisation is the problem of determining the optimal green length for each signal in a set of traffic signals. The literature has effectively tackled such a problem, mostly with automated planning techniques leveraging the PDDL+ language and solvers. However, such language has limitations when it comes to specifying optimisation statements and computing optimal plans. In this paper, we provide an alternative solution to the traffic signal optimisation problem based on Constraint Answer Set Programming (CASP). We devise an encoding in a CASP language, which is then solved by means of clingcon 3, a system extending the well-known ASP solver clingo. We performed experiments on real historical data from the town of Huddersfield in the UK, comparing our approach to the PDDL+ model that obtained the best results for the considered benchmark. The results showed the potential of our approach for tackling the traffic signal optimisation problem and improving the solution quality of the PDDL+ plans.

preprint2025arXiv

Improving ASP-based ORS Schedules through Machine Learning Predictions

The Operating Room Scheduling (ORS) problem deals with the optimization of daily operating room surgery schedules. It is a challenging problem subject to many constraints, like to determine the starting time of different surgeries and allocating the required resources, including the availability of beds in different department units. Recently, solutions to this problem based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) have been delivered. Such solutions are overall satisfying but, when applied to real data, they can currently only verify whether the encoding aligns with the actual data and, at most, suggest alternative schedules that could have been computed. As a consequence, it is not currently possible to generate provisional schedules. Furthermore, the resulting schedules are not always robust. In this paper, we integrate inductive and deductive techniques for solving these issues. We first employ machine learning algorithms to predict the surgery duration, from historical data, to compute provisional schedules. Then, we consider the confidence of such predictions as an additional input to our problem and update the encoding correspondingly in order to compute more robust schedules. Results on historical data from the ASL1 Liguria in Italy confirm the viability of our integration. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

preprint2022arXiv

On the Configuration of More and Less Expressive Logic Programs

The decoupling between the representation of a certain problem, i.e., its knowledge model, and the reasoning side is one of main strong points of model-based Artificial Intelligence (AI). This allows, e.g. to focus on improving the reasoning side by having advantages on the whole solving process. Further, it is also well-known that many solvers are very sensitive to even syntactic changes in the input. In this paper, we focus on improving the reasoning side by taking advantages of such sensitivity. We consider two well-known model-based AI methodologies, SAT and ASP, define a number of syntactic features that may characterise their inputs, and use automated configuration tools to reformulate the input formula or program. Results of a wide experimental analysis involving SAT and ASP domains, taken from respective competitions, show the different advantages that can be obtained by using input reformulation and configuration. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

preprint2020arXiv

Proceedings 36th International Conference on Logic Programming (Technical Communications)

Since the first conference held in Marseille in 1982, ICLP has been the premier international event for presenting research in logic programming. Contributions are solicited in all areas of logic programming and related areas, including but not restricted to: - Foundations: Semantics, Formalisms, Answer-Set Programming, Non-monotonic Reasoning, Knowledge Representation. - Declarative Programming: Inference engines, Analysis, Type and mode inference, Partial evaluation, Abstract interpretation, Transformation, Validation, Verification, Debugging, Profiling, Testing, Logic-based domain-specific languages, constraint handling rules. - Related Paradigms and Synergies: Inductive and Co-inductive Logic Programming, Constraint Logic Programming, Interaction with SAT, SMT and CSP solvers, Logic programming techniques for type inference and theorem proving, Argumentation, Probabilistic Logic Programming, Relations to object-oriented and Functional programming, Description logics, Neural-Symbolic Machine Learning, Hybrid Deep Learning and Symbolic Reasoning. - Implementation: Concurrency and distribution, Objects, Coordination, Mobility, Virtual machines, Compilation, Higher Order, Type systems, Modules, Constraint handling rules, Meta-programming, Foreign interfaces, User interfaces. - Applications: Databases, Big Data, Data Integration and Federation, Software Engineering, Natural Language Processing, Web and Semantic Web, Agents, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Education, Computational life sciences, Education, Cybersecurity, and Robotics.

preprint2019arXiv

Abstract Solvers for Computing Cautious Consequences of ASP programs

Abstract solvers are a method to formally analyze algorithms that have been profitably used for describing, comparing and composing solving techniques in various fields such as Propositional Satisfiability (SAT), Quantified SAT, Satisfiability Modulo Theories, Answer Set Programming (ASP), and Constraint ASP. In this paper, we design, implement and test novel abstract solutions for cautious reasoning tasks in ASP. We show how to improve the current abstract solvers for cautious reasoning in ASP with new techniques borrowed from backbone computation in SAT, in order to design new solving algorithms. By doing so, we also formally show that the algorithms for solving cautious reasoning tasks in ASP are strongly related to those for computing backbones of Boolean formulas. We implement some of the new solutions in the ASP solver WASP and show that their performance are comparable to state-of-the-art solutions on the benchmark problems from the past ASP Competitions. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.

preprint2019arXiv

The Seventh Answer Set Programming Competition: Design and Results

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a prominent knowledge representation language with roots in logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. Biennial ASP competitions are organized in order to furnish challenging benchmark collections and assess the advancement of the state of the art in ASP solving. In this paper, we report on the design and results of the Seventh ASP Competition, jointly organized by the University of Calabria (Italy), the University of Genova (Italy), and the University of Potsdam (Germany), in affiliation with the 14th International Conference on Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning (LPNMR 2017). (Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP).

preprint2015arXiv

Disjunctive Answer Set Solvers via Templates

Answer set programming is a declarative programming paradigm oriented towards difficult combinatorial search problems. A fundamental task in answer set programming is to compute stable models, i.e., solutions of logic programs. Answer set solvers are the programs that perform this task. The problem of deciding whether a disjunctive program has a stable model is $Σ^P_2$-complete. The high complexity of reasoning within disjunctive logic programming is responsible for few solvers capable of dealing with such programs, namely DLV, GnT, Cmodels, CLASP and WASP. In this paper we show that transition systems introduced by Nieuwenhuis, Oliveras, and Tinelli to model and analyze satisfiability solvers can be adapted for disjunctive answer set solvers. Transition systems give a unifying perspective and bring clarity in the description and comparison of solvers. They can be effectively used for analyzing, comparing and proving correctness of search algorithms as well as inspiring new ideas in the design of disjunctive answer set solvers. In this light, we introduce a general template, which accounts for major techniques implemented in disjunctive solvers. We then illustrate how this general template captures solvers DLV, GnT and Cmodels. We also show how this framework provides a convenient tool for designing new solving algorithms by means of combinations of techniques employed in different solvers.

preprint2013arXiv

A Multi-Engine Approach to Answer Set Programming

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming, that has been recently employed in many applications. The development of efficient ASP systems is, thus, crucial. Having in mind the task of improving the solving methods for ASP, there are two usual ways to reach this goal: $(i)$ extending state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or $(ii)$ designing a new ASP solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing automatically the "best" available solver on a per-instance basis. In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of cheap-to-compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP programs. Then, we apply classification methods that, given the features of the instances in a {\sl training} set and the solvers' performance on these instances, inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a {\sl test} set. We report the results of a number of experiments considering solvers and different training and test sets of instances taken from the ones submitted to the "System Track" of the 3rd ASP Competition. Our analysis shows that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve more instances compared with any solver that entered the 3rd ASP Competition. (To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).)