P. Terenziani, INTEGRATING CALENDAR DATES AND QUALITATIVE TEMPORAL CONSTRAINTS IN THE TREATMENT OF PERIODIC EVENTS, IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering, 9(5), 1997, pp. 763-783
Citations number
51
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Computer Sciences, Special Topics","Engineering, Eletrical & Electronic","Computer Science Artificial Intelligence","Computer Science Information Systems
The paper describes a framework for representing and reasoning with pe
riodic events. In particular, it proposes a temporal formalism which d
eals with both 1) quantitative information concerning the frame of tim
e (e.g., between 1990 and 1993) and the user-defined calendar-dates (e
.g., on the first Mondays of April) in which periodic events are locat
ed and 2) the qualitative relations between periodic events (e.g., Sam
visits the branch office X01 before going to his office). The meaning
of the temporal specifications in our formalism is described in logic
al terms. The paper defines the basic operations of inversion, interse
ction and composition of temporal specifications. These operations are
correct (with respect to the logical definition of the specifications
) and do not lose information. Finally, the paper also describes a cor
rect algorithm which takes advantage of these operations for performin
g temporal reasoning, and analyses its complexity. An application of t
he temporal framework to the scheduling in an office is shown in an ex
ample.