The Design and Experimental Analysis of Algorithms for Temporal Reasoning

Many applications from planning and scheduling to problems in molecular biology rely heavily on a temporal reasoning component In this paper we discuss the design and empirical analysis of algorithms for a temporal reasoning system based on Allen s in uential interval based framework for representing temporal information At the core of the system are algorithms for determining whether the temporal information is consistent and if so nding one or more scenarios that are consistent with the temporal information Two important algorithms for these tasks are a path consistency algorithm and a backtracking algorithm For the path consistency algorithm we develop techniques that can result in up to a ten fold speedup over an already highly optimized implementation For the backtracking algorithm we develop variable and value ordering heuristics that are shown empirically to dramatically improve the performance of the algorithm As well we show that a previously suggested reformulation of the backtracking search problem can reduce the time and space requirements of the backtracking search Taken together the techniques we develop allow a temporal reasoning component to solve problems that are of practical size