  In this work, we propose Answer-Set Programming (ASP) as a tool for rapid
prototyping of dynamic programming algorithms based on tree decompositions. In
fact, many such algorithms have been designed, but only a few of them found
their way into implementation. The main obstacle is the lack of easy-to-use
systems which (i) take care of building a tree decomposition and (ii) provide
an interface for declarative specifications of dynamic programming algorithms.
In this paper, we present D-FLAT, a novel tool that relieves the user of having
to handle all the technical details concerned with parsing, tree decomposition,
the handling of data structures, etc. Instead, it is only the dynamic
programming algorithm itself which has to be specified in the ASP language.
D-FLAT employs an ASP solver in order to compute the local solutions in the
dynamic programming algorithm. In the paper, we give a few examples
illustrating the use of D-FLAT and describe the main features of the system.
Moreover, we report experiments which show that ASP-based D-FLAT encodings for
some problems outperform monolithic ASP encodings on instances of small
treewidth.
