Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
390847 Fuzzy Sets and Systems 2009 20 Pages PDF
Abstract

Partial evaluation (PE) is an automatic program transformation technique aiming to obtain, among other advantages, the optimization of a program with respect to parts of its input: hence, it is also known as program specialization. This paper introduces the subject of PE into the field of fuzzy logic programming. We define the concept of PE for multi-adjoint logic programs and goals, and apart from discussing the benefits achieved by this technique, we also introduce in the fuzzy setting a completely novel application of PE which allows us the computation of reductants guaranteeing completeness properties without harming the computational efficiency. Reductants are a special kind of fuzzy rules which constitute an essential theoretical tool for proving correctness properties. As observed in the specialized literature, a multi-adjoint logic program, when interpreted on a partially ordered lattice, has to include all its reductants in order to preserve the (approximate) completeness property. This introduces severe penalties in the implementation of efficient multi-adjoint logic programming systems: not only the size of programs increases but also their execution time. In this paper we define a refinement to the notion of reductant based on PE techniques, that we call PE-reductant. We establish the main properties of PE-reductants (i.e., the classical concept of reductant and the new notion of PE-reductant are both, semantically and operationally, equivalent) and, what is the best, we demonstrate that our refined notion of PE-reductant is even able to increase the efficiency of multi-adjoint logic programs.

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