Leveraging the approach of answer set programming in artificial intelligence, we propose an ASP-based novel approach to construct an RBAC system that can comply with constraints and meet multiobjective optimization at the same time, namely constrained role miner (CRM). In the field of artificial intelligence, ASP has been viewed as an effective programming language for knowledge representation and declarative problem solving [15]. Different from traditional imperative programming languages (C++, Java, etc.), it is about ‘‘what to do’’, without considering many details of ‘‘how to do’’, for solving a problem. ASP allows us to adopt mature ASP solvers that have been proved to work well in practice.
Moreover, its rich modeling language eases the understanding and explanation of the problem. With the advantage of ASP, we do not need to implement a variety of specific conflict resolution algorithm, only to describe the constraints problem with ASP modeling language. The case of role mining problem is the same, and the problem can also be solved with ASP approach. Finally, we compute an answer set of the ASP program with ASP solver, and extract the solution if the problem is solvable