The concept of a stable model provided a declarative semantics for Prolog programs with negation as failure and became a starting point for the development of answer set programming. In this paper we propose a new definition of that concept, which covers many constructs used in answer set programming and, unlike the original definition, refers neither to grounding nor to fixpoints. It is based on a syntactic transformation similar to parallel circumscription.

PDF

Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 175 (2011), pp. 236--263.

@Article{fer09, title={Stable Models and Circumscription}, author={Paolo Ferraris and Joohyung Lee and Vladimir Lifschitz}, volume={175}, journal={Artificial Intelligence}, pages={236--263}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?fer09", year={2011} }