Temporal reasoning about composite and/or periodic events

Paolo Terenziani, Luca Anselma
2006 Journal of experimental and theoretical artificial intelligence (Print)  
In many application areas, including planning, workflow, guideline and protocol management, the description of the domain involves composite and/or periodic events, mutually related by temporal constraints on the execution order. Such events represent 'classes', since they can be instantiated to specific executions of the plan, guideline etc., and each execution must 'respect' the temporal constraints imposed on the corresponding classes. The main objective of our work is that of proposing an
more » ... proach dealing with the above-mentioned temporal phenomena. To achieve such an objective, we propose a tractable domain-independent temporal reasoner. This enhances the generality of our approach, which provides a domain-independent module which can be integrated with other software tools to solve temporal problems in specific domains. From the methodological point of view, we first devise a representation formalism coping with the aforesaid phenomena, and then we describe temporal constraint propagation algorithms to deal with constraint inheritance and to perform temporal consistency checking. The representation formalism has been designed carefully, to obtain algorithms that are both complete and tractable. Finally, the paper also shows experimental results, including an application of our approach to clinical guidelines, evaluating their impact on future applications and research activities.
doi:10.1080/09528130500412050 fatcat:6anom5gcsbcpfdqbdkqyetmari