Faster and better simple temporal problems

In this paper we give a structural characterization and ex- tend the tractability frontier of the Simple Temporal Problem (STP) by defining the class of the Extended Simple Temporal Problem (ESTP), which augments STP with strict inequal- ities and monotone Boolean formulae on inequations (i.e., formulae involving the operations of conjunction, disjunction and parenthesization). A polynomial-time algorithm is pro- vided to solve ESTP, faster than previous state-of-the-art al- gorithms for other extensions of STP that had been consid- ered in the literature, all encompassed by ESTP. We show the practical competitiveness of our approach through a proof-of- concept implementation and an experimental evaluation involving also state-of-the-art SMT solvers.