Declarative Specification of Benchmark Sessions via ASP

ABSTRACT. As a matter of fact, benchmark sessions are easy to describe in a declarative fashion, but are usually painful to implement in practice. In this paper we describe DecBench, a suite of tools conceived for easing the task of configuring and running structured software benchmark analyses of command line executables. Benchmark sessions are specified in DecBench by means of Answer Set Programming (ASP), a declarative knowledge representation language having its roots in nonmonotonic reasoning and logic programming. The provided declarative specification is fed in an ASP solver, and the output is used to produce a Makefile that controls the execution of the specified benchmark analysis. The paper reports also a complete usecase conceived to validate the presented tool.