Solving Vehicle Equipment Specification Problems with Answer Set Programming.

We develop an approach to solving mono- and multiobjective vehicle equipment specification problems considering the corporate average fuel economy standard (CAFE problems, in short) in automobile industry. Our approach relies upon Answer Set Programming (ASP). The resulting system aspcafe accepts a CAFE instance expressed in the orthogonal variability model format and converts it into ASP facts. In turn, these facts are combined with an ASP encoding for CAFE solving, which can subsequently be solved by any off-the-shelf ASP systems. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments using a benchmark set based on real data provided by a collaborating Japanese automaker.