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From: jair-ed@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov
Subject: New Article, The Design and Experimental ...
Message-ID: <1996Jan24.181902.3552@ptolemy-ethernet.arc.nasa.gov>
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Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 18:19:02 GMT
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JAIR is pleased to announce the publication of the following article:

van Beek, P. and Manchak, D.W. (1995)
  "The Design and Experimental Analysis of Algorithms for Temporal Reasoning", 
   Volume 4, pages 1-18.
   HTML: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/jair/volume4/vanbeek96a-html/paper.html
   PostScript: volume4/vanbeek96a.ps (219K)
	       compressed, volume4/vanbeek96a.ps.Z (90K)


   Abstract: 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 influential 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, finding
   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.

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