  Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm. The
intrinsic complexity of the evaluation of ASP programs makes the development of
more effective and faster systems a challenging research topic. This paper
reports on the recent improvements of the ASP solver WASP. WASP is undergoing a
refactoring process which will end up in the release of a new and more
performant version of the software. In particular the paper focus on the
improvements to the core evaluation algorithms working on normal programs. A
preliminary experiment on benchmarks from the 3rd ASP competition belonging to
the NP class is reported. The previous version of WASP was often not
competitive with alternative solutions on this class. The new version of WASP
shows a substantial increase in performance.
