Tractability Frontier for Dually-Closed Temporal Quantified Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Abstract: A temporal (constraint) language is a relational structure with a first-order definition in the rational numbers with the order. We study here the complexity of the Quantified Constraint Satisfaction Problem (QCSP) for temporal constraint languages. Our main contribution is a dichotomy for the restricted class of dually-closed temporal languages. We prove that QCSP for such a language is either solvable in polynomial time or it is hard for NP or coNP. Our result generalizes a similar dichotomy of QCSPs for equality languages, which are relational structures definable by Boolean combinations of equalities.