The complexity of constraints on intervals and lengths

Abstract

We study interval-valued constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), in which the aim is to find an assignment of intervals to a given set of variables subject to constraints on the relative positions of intervals. One interesting question concerning such problems is to determine exactly how the complexity of an interval-valued CSP depends on the set of constraints allowed in instances. For the framework known as Allen’s interval algebra this question was completely answered earlier by the authors. Here we extend the qualitative framework of Allen’s algebra with additional constraints on the lengths of intervals. We allow these length constraints to be expressed as Horn disjunctive linear relations, a well-known tractable and sufficiently expressive form of constraints. We completely characterize sets of qualitative relations for which the constraint satisfaction problem augmented with arbitrary length constraints of the above form is tractable. We also show that all the remaining cases are NP-complete.