Path Consistency in a Network of Non-Convex Intervals

Robert A. Morris, William D. Shoaff, Lina Khatib
1993 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence  
Reasoning about time often involves incomplete information about periods and their relationships. Varieties of incompleteness include uncertainty about the number of objects involved, the distribution of a set of temporal relations among these objects, and what can be called the participation of a set of objects in a temporal relation. A solution to the problem of representing and reasoning about incomplete temporal information of these kinds is forthcoming if a restricted class of non-convex
more » ... tervals (called n-tntervals) is added to the temporal domain of discourse. An n-interval corresponds to the common sense notion of a recurring period of time with a (possibly) unspecified number of occurrences. In this paper, we formalize a representation for temporal reasoning problems using n-intervals. The language of the framework is restricted in such a way that tractable techniques from constraint satisfaction can be applied. Specifically, it is demonstrated how the problem of determining path-consistency in a network of binary n-interval relations can be solved.
dblp:conf/ijcai/MorrisSK93 fatcat:crrrr4ivevfjvljij4e35jahye