Preferred well-founded semantics for logic programming by alternating fixpoints: Preliminary report

We analyze the problem of defining well-founded semantics for ordered logic programs within a general framework based on alternating fixpoint theory. We start by showing that generalizations of existing answer set approaches to preference are too weak in the setting of well-founded semantics. We then specify some informal yet intuitive criteria and propose a semantical framework for preference handling that is more suitable for defining well-founded semantics for ordered logic programs. The suitability of the new approach is convinced by the fact that many attractive properties are satisfied by our semantics. In particular, our semantics is still correct with respect to various existing answer sets semantics while it successfully overcomes the weakness of their generalization to well-founded semantics. Finally, we indicate how an existing preferred well-founded semantics can be captured within our semantical framework.