A Simple Way to Improve Path Consistency Processing in Interval Algebra Networks

Reasoning about qualitative temporal information is essential in many artificial intelligence problems. In particular, many tasks can be solved using the interval-based temporal algebra introduced by Allen (All83). In this framework, one of the main tasks is to compute the transitive closure of a network of relations between intervals (also called path consistency in a CSP-like terminology). Almost all previous path consistency algorithms proposed in the temporal reasoning literature were based on the constraint reasoning algorithms PC-1 and PC-2 (Mac77). In this paper, we first show that the most efficient of these algorithms is the one which stays the closest to PC-2. Afterwards, we propose a new algorithm, using the idea "one support is sufficient" (as AC-3 (Mac77) does for arc consistency in constraint networks). Actually, to apply this idea, we simply changed the way composition-intersection of relations was achieved during the path consistency process in previous algorithms.

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