On the Complexity of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: A Maximal Tractable Fragment of the Region Connection Calculus

  • Authors:
  • Jochen Renz;Bernhard Nebel

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • On the Complexity of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: A Maximal Tractable Fragment of the Region Connection Calculus
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

The computational properties of qualitative spatial reasoning have been investigated to some degree. However, the question for the boundary between polynomial and NP-hard reasoning problems has not been addressed yet. In this paper we explore this boundary in the ``Region Connection Calculus'''' RCC-8. We extend Bennett''s encoding of RCC-8 in modal logic. Based on this encoding, we prove that reasoning is NP-complete in general and identify a maximal tractable subset of the relations in RCC-8 that contains all base relations. Further, we show that for this subset path-consistency is sufficient for deciding consistency.