Quick Start

This section highlights the basic features of Clorm by way of a simple example. This example covers:

  • Defining a simple data model,

  • Combining a statically written ASP program with dynamically generated data,

  • Running the Clingo solver,

  • Querying and processing the solution returned by the solver.

This example is located in the project’s examples/quickstart sub-directory; where the ASP program is quickstart.lp and the Python program is quickstart.py. There is also a version embedded_quickstart.lp that can be called directly from Clingo:

$ clingo embedded_quickstart.lp

This document is about the Clingo ORM API and it is therefore assumed that the reader is reasonably familiar with ASP syntax and how to write an ASP program. However, if this is not the case it is worth going to the Clingo docs for links to some good reference material.

While we assume that the reader is familiar with ASP, we do not assume that the reader is necessarily familiar with the official Clingo Python API. Since Clorm is designed to be used with the Clingo API we therefore provide some basic explanations of the relevant steps necessary to run the Clingo solver. However, for more detailed documentation see the Clingo API.

An Example Scenario

Imagine you are running a courier company and you have drivers that need to make daily deliveries. An item is delivered during one of four time slots, and you want to assign a driver to deliver each item, while also ensuring that all items are assigned and drivers aren’t double-booked for a time slot.

You also want to apply some optimisation criteria. Firstly, you want to minimise the number of drivers that you use (for example, because bringing on a driver for a day has some fixed cost). Secondly, you want to deliver items as early in the day as possible.

The ASP Program

The above crieria can be encoded with the following simple ASP program:

time(1..4).

1 { assignment(I, D, T) : driver(D), time(T) } 1 :- item(I).
:- assignment(I1, D, T), assignment(I2, D, T), I1 != I2.

working_driver(D) :- assignment(_,D,_).

#minimize { 1@2,D : working_driver(D) }.
#minimize { T@1,D : assignment(_,D,T) }.

You will notice that while the above ASP program encodes the problem domain, but it does not specify the problem instance, which in this case means specifying the individual delivery drivers and items to be delivered.

The Python Program

Unlike the ASP encoding of the problem domain, which is largely static and changes only if the requirements change, the problem instance changes daily. Hence it cannot be a simple static encoding but must instead be generated as part of the Python application that calls the ASP solver and processes the solution. Clorm is designed with this use-case in mind.

First the relevant libraries need to be imported.

from clorm import Predicate, ConstantField, IntegerField
from clorm.clingo import Control

Note

Importing from clorm.clingo instead of clingo.

While it is possible to use Clorm with the raw clingo library, a wrapper library is provided to make the integration seemless. This wrapper (should) behave identically to the original module, except that it extends the functionality to offer integration with Clorm objects. It is also possible to monkey patch Clingo if this is your preferred approach (see Integration with the Solver).

Defining the Data Model

The most important step is to define a data model that maps the Clingo predicates to Python classes. Clorm provides the Predicate and ComplexTerm classes for this purpose (although, for this example only the Predicate class is needed). These classes must be sub-classed; a Predicate sub-class defines a direct mapping to an underlying ASP logical predicate. The parameters of the predicate are specified using a number of field classes. Fields can be thought of as term definitions, as they define how a logical term is converted to, and from, a Python object. Clorm provides three standard field classes, ConstantField, StringField, and IntegerField, that correspond to the standard logic programming data types of constant, string, and integer.

class Driver(Predicate):
    name=ConstantField

class Item(Predicate):
    name=ConstantField

class Assignment(Predicate):
    item=ConstantField
    driver=ConstantField
    time=IntegerField

The above code defines three classes to match the ASP program’s input and output predicates, where the name of the predicate to map to is derived from the declared class name.

Driver maps to the driver/1 predicate, Item maps to item/1, and Assignment maps to assignment/3 (note: the /n is a common logic programming notation for specifying the arity of a predicate or function). A predicate can contain zero or more fields.

The number of fields in the Predicate declaration must match the predicate arity and the order in which they are declared must also match the position of each term in the ASP predicate.

One thing to note here is that there is no Predicate sub-class that was defined corresponding to the working_driver/1 predicate. Clorm does not require that all ASP predicates have a corresponding Python Predicate sub-class. In this case working_driver/1 is only of interest within the ASP program itself and is not used for defining the relevant inputs and outputs of the solver, so there is no need to define any Python interface.

Using the Data Model to Generate Solutions

Once the data model has been defined it can be used to instantiate facts that are asserted to, or extract from, the ASP solver. In particular, it will be used to dynamically add the facts that make up a problem instance, and then to extract and print the models that correspond to solutions to the problem.

First, the Control object needs to be created and initialised, and the static problem domain encoding must be loaded.

ctrl = Control(unifier=[Driver,Item,Assignment])
ctrl.load("quickstart.lp")

The Control object controls the operations of the ASP solver. When the solver runs it generates models. These models constitute the solutions to the problem. Facts within a model are encoded as clingo.Symbol objects. The unifier argument is important as it defines which symbols are turned into Predicate instances.

For every symbol fact in the model, Clorm will successively attempt to unify (or match) the symbol against the predicates in the unifier list. When a match is found the symbol is used to define an instance of the matching predicate. Any symbol that does not unify against any of the predicates is ignored.

Once the control object is created and the unifier predicates specified the static ASP program is loaded.

Next we generate a problem instance by generating a lists of Driver and Item objects. These items are added to a FactBase object, which is a specialised set-like container for storing facts (i.e., predicate instances).

from clorm import FactBase

drivers = [ Driver(name=n) for n in ["dave", "morri", "michael" ] ]
items = [ Item(name="item{}".format(i)) for i in range(1,6) ]
instance = FactBase(drivers + items)

The Driver and Item constructors use named parameters that match the declared field names. While Clorm supports the use of positional arguments to initialise instances, doing so will potentially make the code harder to refactor. So in general you should avoid using positional arguments except for a few cases (eg., simple tuples where the order is unlikely to change).

Now, these input facts can be added to the control object and combined with the previously loaded ASP program to produce a grounded ASP program.

ctrl.add_facts(instance)
ctrl.ground([("base",[])])

At this point the control object is ready to be run and generate solutions. There are a number of ways in which the ASP solver can be run (see the Clingo API documentation). For this example we run it using a callback function, which is called each time a model is found.

solution=None
def on_model(model):
    global solution     # Note: use `nonlocal` keyword depending on scope
    solution = model.facts(atoms=True)

ctrl.solve(on_model=on_model)
if not solution:
    raise ValueError("No solution found")

The on_model() callback is triggered for every new model. Because of the ASP optimisation statements this callback can potentially be triggered multiple times before an optimal model is found. Also, note that if the problem is unsatisfiable then it will never be called and you should always check for this case.

The line solution = model.facts(atoms=True) extracts only instances of the predicates that were registered with the unifier parameter that was passed down through the Control object constructor. As mentioned earlier, any facts that fail to unify are ignored. In this case it ignores the working_driver/1 instances. The unified facts are stored and returned in a FactBase object.

Querying

Note

As of Clorm 1.2.1 the new Query API should be the preferred query mechanism. It provides all the functionality of the old query interface and much more; including SQL-like joins between predicates and controlling how the query results are presented.

The final part of our Python program involves querying the solution to print out the relevant facts. In particular it would be useful to display all drivers and any jobs they have. To do this we call the factbase’s FactBase.query() member function that returns a suitable Query object.

The query is defined in terms of a chaining over the member functions of a Query object. Each function call returns a modified copy of the Query object. This technique will be be familiar to users of Python ORM’s such as SQLAlchemy or Peewee.

from clorm import ph1_

query=solution.query(Assignment)\
              .where(Assignment.driver == ph1_)\
              .order_by(Assignment.time)

The above query defines a search over the Assignment predicate to match the driver field to a special placeholder object ph1_ and to return the assignments for that driver sorted by the delivery time. The value of ph1_ will be provided when the query is executed. The query clause here mirrors a traditional SQL FROM clause.

We can now loop over the known drivers and execute the query for each driver. This is done by first binding the value of the placeholder ph1_ to a specific value and calling the Query.all() method. This function returns a Python generator which is then used to execute and iterate over the results.

for d in drivers:
    assignments = list(query.bind(d.name).all())
    if not assignments:
        print("Driver {} is not working today".format(d.name))
    else:
        print("Driver {} must deliver: ".format(d.name))
        for a in assignments:
            print("\t Item {} at time {}".format(a.item, a.time))

Calling query.bind(d.name) first creates a new query with the placeholder values assigned. Because d.name is the first parameter to the function call it matches against the placeholder ph1_. Clorm has four predefined placeholders ph1_,… , ph4_, but more can be created using the ph_ function.

Running this example produces the following results:

$ cd examples
$ python quickstart.py
Driver dave must deliver:
         Item item5 at time 1
         Item item4 at time 2
Driver morri must deliver:
         Item item1 at time 1
         Item item2 at time 2
         Item item3 at time 3
Driver michael is not working today

Note, the Clorm Query API doesn’t support SQL style outer joins. Therefore to view the items for all drivers, including those drivers with no assignments, it was simplest to execute a query for each driver. However, if we were happy to only specify the drivers with assignments then the problem could be formulated in terms of a query with a grouping modifier.

query=solution.query(Assignment)\
              .group_by(Assignment.driver)\
              .order_by(Assignment.time)\
              .select(Assignment.item,Assignment.time)

for dname, grpit in query.all():
    print("Driver {} must deliver: ".format(dname))
    for item,time in grpit:
        print("\t Item {} at time {}".format(item, time))

Here the Query.group_by() modifies the query generator output to return pairs of objects; where the first element of the pair consists of the elements specified by the group_by clause and the second element is an iterator over the matching elements for that group (here ordered by delivery time).

It is also worth noting that the Query.select() projection operator performs a similar function to an SQL SELECT clause to modify the output. Here, instead of returning the assignment item itself, it returns the two relevant parameter values.

Old Query API

For comparison the following shows the same example but using the old query API.

from clorm import ph1_

query=solution.select(Assignment)\
              .where(Assignment.driver == ph1_).order_by(Assignment.time)

for d in drivers:
    assignments = query.get(d.name)
    if not assignments:
        print("Driver {} is not working today".format(d.name))
    else:
        print("Driver {} must deliver: ".format(d.name))
        for a in assignments:
            print("\t Item {} at time {}".format(a.item, a.time))

The old interface starts with a FactBase.select() call to return a Select object. This specifies both the predicate to be queried and the output format of the query. Comparing this to the new query API the old interface only allows a single predicate to be queried and the output format is fixed and cannot be modified.

Calling query.get(d.name) executes the query for the given driver as well as binding the placeholders. An important difference between the old and new interfaces is that the call to Select.get() executes the query and returns a list of the results. In contrast the call to Query.all() returns a generator and the query is executed by the generator during its iteration.

Other Clorm Features

The above example shows some of the basic features of Clorm and how to match the Python data model to the defined ASP predicates. However, beyond the basics outlined above there are other important features that will be useful for more complex interactions. These include:

  • Defining complex-terms. Many ASP programs include complex terms (i.e., either tuples or functional objects). Clorm supports predicate definitions that include complex-terms using a ComplexTerm class. Every defined complex term has an associated Field property that can be used within a Predicate definition.

from clorm import ComplexTerm

class Event(ComplexTerm):
    date=StringField
    name=StringField

class Log(Predicate):
    event=Event.Field
    level=IntegerField

The above definition can be used to match against an ASP fact containing a complex term.

log(event("2019-04-05", "goto shops"), 0).
  • Custom fields. The IntegerField, StringField, and ConstantField classes are in fact sub-classes of a RawField class. Custom data conversions can be performed by sub-classing RawField directly, or by sub-classing one of its existing sub-classes. For example, a DateField can be defined that converts Python date objects into Clingo strings with YYYY-MM-DD formatting.

from clorm import StringField          # StringField is a sub-class of RawField
from datetime import datetime

class DateField(StringField):
    pytocl = lambda dt: dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
    cltopy = lambda s: datetime.datetime.strptime(s,"%Y-%m-%d").date()

class DeliveryDate(Predicate):
    item=ConstantField()
    date=DateField()
  • Clingo allows Python functions to be called from within an ASP program using the @-syntax. Values are passed to these Python functions as clingo.Symbol objects and it is up to the Python code to perform all appropriate data conversions.

    Clorm provides a number of mechanisms to automate this data conversion process through the specification of a data conversion signature.

    In the following example the function add is decorated with an automatic data conversion signature that accepts two input integers and returns an output integer.

@make_function_asp_callable(IntegerField, IntegerField, IntegerField)
def add(a,b): a+b
f(@add(5,6)).    % grounds to f(11).

The default behaviour of the Clingo API does infact provide some minimal automatic data conversion for the @-functions. In particular, it will automatically convert numbers and strings, however it cannot deal with other types such as constants or more complex terms.

The Clorm mechanism of a data conversion signatures provide a more principled and transparent approach; it can deal with arbitrary conversions and all data conversions are clear since they are specified as part of the signature.