Two Solvers for Tractable Temporal Constraints with Preferences

A number of reasoning problems involving the manipulation of temporal information can naturally be viewed as implicitly inducing an ordering of potential local decisions involving time on the basis of preferences. Soft temporal constraints problems allow to describe in a natural way scenarios where events happen over time and preferences are associated to event distances and durations. In general, solving soft temporal problems require exponential time in the worst case, but there are interesting subclasses of problems which are polynomially solvable. We describe two solvers based on two different approaches for solving the same tractable subclass. For each solver we present the theoretical results it stands on, a description of the algorithm and some experimental results. The random generator used to build the problems on which tests are performed is also described. Finally, we compare the two solvers highlighting the tradeoff between performance and representational power.