{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Solving Interval Algebra Networks","authors":[{"name":"Jason Jingshi Li","slug":"jason-jingshi-li","given":"Jason Jingshi","family":"Li","affiliation":""},{"name":"Jinbo Huang","slug":"jinbo-huang","given":"Jinbo","family":"Huang","affiliation":""},{"name":"Jochen Renz","slug":"jochen-renz","given":"Jochen","family":"Renz","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Deciding consistency of constraint networks is a fundamental problem in qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning. In this paper we introduce a divide-and-conquer method that recursively partitions a given problem into smaller sub-problems in deciding consistency. We identify a key theoretical property of a qualitative calculus that ensures the soundness and completeness of this method, and show that it is satisfied by the Interval Algebra (IA) and the Point Algebra (PA). We develop a new encoding scheme for IA networks based on a combination of our divide-and-conquer method with an existing encoding of IA networks into SAT. We empirically show that our new encoding scheme scales to much larger problems and exhibits a consistent and significant improvement in efficiency over state-of-the-art solvers on the most difficult instances.Jason Jingshi Li, Jinbo Huang, Jochen Renz","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/101","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/0101.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/101.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/bibtex/101","volume":{"slug":"2009","title":"Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2009","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/","year":2009,"location":"Pasadena, California, USA","dates":"","editors":"Hiroaki Kitano","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":101,"pages":{"first":572,"last":576},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}