Temporal reasoning in nested temporal networks with alternatives

Abstract

Temporal networks play a crucial role in modeling temporal relations in planning and scheduling applications. Temporal Networks with Alternatives (TNAs) were proposed to model alternative and parallel processes in production scheduling, however the problem of deciding which nodes can be consistently included in such networks is NP-complete. A tractable subclass, called Nested TNAs, can still cover a wide range of real-life processes, while the problem of deciding node validity is solvable in polynomial time. In this paper, we show that adding simple temporal constraints (instead of precedence relations) to Nested TNAs makes the problem NP-hard again. We also present several complete and incomplete techniques for temporal reasoning in Nested TNAs. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.