Reasoning about temporal relations : the maximal tractable subalgebras of Allen's interval algebra

Krokhin, A.; Jeavons, P.; Jonsson, P.

Abstract

Allen's interval algebra is one of the best established formalisms for temporal reasoning. This article provides the final step in the classification of complexity for satisfiability problems over constraints expressed in this algebra. When the constraints are chosen from the full Allen's algebra, this form of satisfiability problem is known to be NP-complete. However, eighteen tractable subalgebras have previously been identified; we show here that these subalgebras include all possible tractable subsets of Allen's algebra. In other words, we show that this algebra contains exactly eighteen maximal tractable subalgebras, and reasoning in any fragment not entirely contained in one of these subalgebras is NP-complete. We obtain this dichotomy result by giving a new uniform description of the known maximal tractable subalgebras, and then systematically using a general algebraic technique for identifying maximal subalgebras with a given property.

Citation

Krokhin, A., Jeavons, P., & Jonsson, P. (2003). Reasoning about temporal relations : the maximal tractable subalgebras of Allen's interval algebra. Journal of the ACM, 50(5), 591-640. https://doi.org/10.1145/876638.876639

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: 2003-09
• Deposit Date: Jan 23, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 8, 2010
• Journal: Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery.
• Print ISSN: 0004-5411
• Electronic ISSN: 1557-735X
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 50
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 591-640
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/876638.876639
• Keywords: Algorithms, Theory, Complexity, Dichotomy theorem, NPcompleteness.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1564599
• Publisher URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/876638.876639