Qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning: Efficient algorithms for everyone

Abstract

In the past years a lot of research effort has been put into finding tractable subsets of spatial and temporal calculi. It has been shown empirically that large tractable subsets of these calculi not only provide efficient algorithms for reasoning problems that can be expressedwith relations contained in the tractable subsets, but also surprisingly efficient solutions to the general, NP-hard reasoning problems of the full calculi. An important step in this direction was the refinement algorithm which provides a heuristic for proving tractability of given subsets of relations. In this paper we extend the refinement algorithm and present a procedure which identifies large tractable subsets of spatial and temporal calculi automatically without any manual intervention and without the need for additional NP-hardness proofs. While we can only guarantee tractability of the resulting sets, our experiments show that for RCC8 and the Interval Algebra, our procedure automatically identifies all maximal tractable subsets. Using our procedure, other researchers and practitioners can automatically develop efficient reasoning algorithms for their spatial or temporal calculi without any theoretical knowledge about how to formally analyse these calculi.