Evaluating Consistency Algorithms for Temporal Metric Constraints

Yang Shi, Anagh Lal, Berthe Y. Choueiry

Abstract: We study the performance of some known algorithms for solving the Simple Temporal Problem (STP) and the Temporal Constraint Satisfaction Problem (TCSP). In particular, we empirically compare the Bellman-Ford (BF) algorithm and its incremental version (incBF) by (Cesta & Oddi 1996) to the ΔSTP of (Xu & Choueiry 2003a). Among the tested algorithms, we show that ΔSTP is the most efficient for determining the consistency of an STP, and that incBF combined with the heuristics of (Xu & Choueiry 2003b) is the most efficient for solving the TCSP. We plan to improve ΔSTP by exploiting incrementality as in incBF and other new incremental algorithms.