Instantaneous Reaction-Time in Dynamic-Consistency Checking of Conditional Simple Temporal Networks -- Extended version with an Improved Upper Bound --

CSTNs is a constraint-based graph-formalism for conditional temporal planning. In order to address the DC-Checking problem, in [Comin and Rizzi, TIME 2015] we introduced epsilon-DC (a refined, more realistic, notion of DC), and provided an algorithmic solution to it. The epsilon-DC notion is interesting per se, and the epsilon-DC-Checking algorithm in [Comin and Rizzi, TIME 2015] rests on the assumption that the reaction-time satisfies epsilon > 0; leaving unsolved the question of what happens when epsilon = 0. In this work, we introduce and study pi-DC, a sound notion of DC with an instantaneous reaction-time (i.e. one in which the planner can react to any observation at the same instant of time in which the observation is made). Firstly, we demonstrate by a counter-example that pi-DC is not equivalent to 0-DC, and that 0-DC is actually inadequate for modeling DC with an instantaneous reaction-time. This shows that the main results obtained in our previous work do not apply directly, as they were formulated, to the case of epsilon=0. Motivated by this observation, as a second contribution, our previous tools are extended in order to handle pi-DC, and the notion of ps-tree is introduced, also pointing out a relationship between pi-DC and HyTN-Consistency. Thirdly, a simple reduction from pi-DC-Checking to DC-Checking is identified. This allows us to design and to analyze the first sound-and-complete pi-DC-Checking procedure. Remarkably, the time complexity of the proposed algorithm remains (pseudo) singly-exponential in the number of propositional letters. Finally, it is observed that the technique can be leveraged to actually reduce from pi-DC to 1-DC, this allows us to further improve the exponents in the time complexity of pi-DC-Checking.