  Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular logic programming paradigm that has
been applied for solving a variety of complex problems. Among the most
challenging real-world applications of ASP are two industrial problems defined
by Siemens: the Partner Units Problem (PUP) and the Combined Configuration
Problem (CCP). The hardest instances of PUP and CCP are out of reach for
state-of-the-art ASP solvers. Experiments show that the performance of ASP
solvers could be significantly improved by embedding domain-specific
heuristics, but a proper effective integration of such criteria in
off-the-shelf ASP implementations is not obvious. In this paper the combination
of ASP and domain-specific heuristics is studied with the goal of effectively
solving real-world problem instances of PUP and CCP. As a byproduct of this
activity, the ASP solver WASP was extended with an interface that eases
embedding new external heuristics in the solver. The evaluation shows that our
domain-heuristic-driven ASP solver finds solutions for all the real-world
instances of PUP and CCP ever provided by Siemens. This paper is under
consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
