SAT-Based Procedures for Temporal Reasoning

In this paper we study the consistency problem for a set of disjunctive temporal constraints [Stergiou and Koubarakis, 1998]. We propose two SAT-based procedures, and show that—on sets of binary randomly generated disjunctive constraints—they perform up to 2 orders of magnitude less consistency checks than the best procedure presented in [Stergiou and Koubarakis, 1998]. On these tests, our experimental analysis confirms Stergiou and Koubarakis’s result about the existence of an easy-hard-easy pattern whose peak corresponds to a value in between 6 and 7 of the ratio of clauses to variables.

[1]  J. Freeman.  Improvements to propositional satisfiability search algorithms , 1995 .

[2]  Fausto Giunchiglia,et al.  Building Decision Procedures for Modal Logics from Propositional Decision Procedure - The Case Study of Modal K , 1996, CADE.

[3]  Rina Dechter,et al.  Temporal Constraint Networks , 1989, Artif. Intell..

[4]  Witold Lukaszewicz,et al.  Reasoning about Plans , 1997, IJCAI.

[5]  Stephen F. Smith,et al.  Generating Feasible Schedules under Complex Metric Constraints , 1994, AAAI.

[6]  Barbara Pernici,et al.  LaTeR: A General Purpose Manager of Temporal Information , 1994, ISMIS.

[7]  Manolis Koubarakis,et al.  Backtracking algorithms for disjunctions of temporal constraints , 1998, Artif. Intell..

[8]  Patrick Prosser,et al.  HYBRID ALGORITHMS FOR THE CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION PROBLEM , 1993, Comput. Intell..

[9]  Nicolas Chleq.  Efficient Algorithms for Networks of Quantitative Temporal Constraints , 1995 .

[10]  M. A. McRobbie,et al.  Automated Deduction — Cade-13 , 1996, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[11]  Marcello D'Agostino,et al.  Are tableaux an improvement on truth-tables? , 1992, J. Log. Lang. Inf..

[12]  Robert M. Haralick,et al.  Increasing Tree Search Efficiency for Constraint Satisfaction Problems , 1979, Artif. Intell..

[13]  Hilary Putnam,et al.  A Computing Procedure for Quantification Theory , 1960, JACM.

[14]  R. Lathe.  Phd by thesis , 1988, Nature.

[15]  Henry A. Kautz,et al.  Reasoning about plans , 1991, Morgan Kaufmann series in representation and reasoning.

[16]  Manolis Koubarakis,et al.  The Complexity of Query Evaluation in Indefinite Temporal Constraint Databases , 1997, Theor. Comput. Sci..

[17]  Christer Bäckström,et al.  A Linear-Programming Approach to Temporal Reasoning , 1996, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 2.