A Global Constraint for a Tractable Class of Temporal Optimization Problems

Abstract

This paper is originally motivated by an application where the objective is to generate a video summary, built using intervals extracted from a video source. In this application, the constraints used to select the relevant pieces of intervals are based on Allen’s algebra. The best state-of-the-art results are obtained with a small set of ad hoc solution techniques, each specific to one combination of the 13 Allen’s relations. Such techniques require some expertise in Constraint Programming. This is a critical issue for video specialists. In this paper, we design a generic constraint, dedicated to a class of temporal problems that covers this case study, among others. ExistAllen takes as arguments a vector of tasks, a set of disjoint intervals and any of the $2^{13}$ combinations of Allen’s relations. ExistAllen holds if and only if the tasks are ordered according to their indexes and for any task at least one relation is satisfied, between the task and at least one interval. We design a propagator that achieves bound-consistency in $O(n+m)$, where n is the number of tasks and m the number of intervals. This propagator is suited to any combination of Allen’s relations, without any specific tuning. Therefore, using our framework does not require a strong expertise in Constraint Programming. The experiments, performed on real data, confirm the relevance of our approach.