Complexity of Prioritized Default Logics
  In default reasoning, usually not all possible ways of resolving conflicts
between default rules are acceptable. Criteria expressing acceptable ways of
resolving the conflicts may be hardwired in the inference mechanism, for
example specificity in inheritance reasoning can be handled this way, or they
may be given abstractly as an ordering on the default rules. In this article we
investigate formalizations of the latter approach in Reiter's default logic.
Our goal is to analyze and compare the computational properties of three such
formalizations in terms of their computational complexity: the prioritized
default logics of Baader and Hollunder, and Brewka, and a prioritized default
logic that is based on lexicographic comparison. The analysis locates the
propositional variants of these logics on the second and third levels of the
polynomial hierarchy, and identifies the boundary between tractable and
intractable inference for restricted classes of prioritized default theories.
