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DA8. Applications of Logic Programming

Statement

  • Conduct research using the internet and the University of the People library to determine what types of computing problems are solved most efficiently using a Logic programming language such as Prolog.
  • As part of your response discuss a specific application and indicate what features within Prolog (or logic programming in general) make it ideally suited as a solution for your selected computing problem.
  • For example: Prolog is ideally suited as a programming language for the artificial intelligence routines within an industrial robot because of x.

Solution

  • Here is a list of some of the use cases of logic programming according to (Novotny, 2023):

    • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: training models requires liking facts and rules together, to build useful models, then query theses models to make predictions.
    • Natural Language Processing: understanding how words relate to each other requires building a knowledge base of facts and rules.
    • Database Management (Non-Relational): to determine the best place to store a record according to a set of rules that govern the database and relationships between records.
    • Predictive Analysis: querying a knowledge base of facts and rules to make predictions.
    • Fault diagnosis: querying an object against the healthy set of other objects to determine if it is faulty.
    • Pattern Matching.
    • Mathematical Proofs.

  • The example that I’m discussing is a Supply Chain Optimization System, for an online retailer that wants to optimize their processes and delivery time/user satisfaction by optimizing their supply chain.

    • Optimizing supply chain requires processing lots of historical data, and making predictions based on that data.
    • Sometimes, making a small change in the process can have a huge impact on the overall performance of the supply chain, but to locate this small change, the logic programming paradigm is very useful.
    • The facts about historical data is entered into the knowledge base, and the constraints on the process are entered as rules and relations.
    • Queries can be made to the knowledge base to examine the data and make predictions about the future.
    • suggested changes can be made to the process, and the knowledge base can be queried again to see if the changes have a positive impact on the performance of the supply chain.
    • Features like backtracking, searching, and unification are used within the query process to make predictions and suggestions, and then examine the results of the suggestions (Jones, 1996).
  • The two previous paragraphs emphasize the importance of logic programming in real world applications, and Prolog is no difference in this regard; and all the features of logic programming are available in Prolog.

References