Efficient algorithms for qualitative reasoning about time

摘要

Reasoning about temporal information is an important task in many areas of Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we address the problem of scalability in temporal reasoning by providing a collection of new algorithms for efficiently managing large sets of qualitative temporal relations. We focus on the class of relations forming the Point Algebra (PA-relations) and on a major extension to include binary disjunctions of PA-relations (PA-disjunctions). Such disjunctions add a great deal of expressive power, including the ability to stipulate disjointness of temporal intervals, which is important in planning applications.