Epistemic specifications and conformant planning

Epistemic Specifications allow for the correct representation of incomplete information in the presence of multiple belief sets by expanding Answer Set Programming with modal operators K and M. The meaning of M in the existing work does not correspond well to the principle of justifiedness accepted by the community. It is, however, challenging to characterize the justfiedness of each belief, due to the complexity introduced by M. We address this issue by identifying a belief set with a program which uniquely decides the belief set. This idea leads to a novel definition of the semantics of Epistemic Specifications which assures that each belief in any belief set is well justified. We also show that conformant planning problems can be naturally represented by Epistemic Specification under our semantics.