Temporal representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence: A review

The explicit representation and reasoning about time is an important proble m ill many areas of artificial intelligence. Over the last 10-15 years, it has been attracting tile attention of many researchers. Several temporal re asoning systems, differing in design issues related to ontology of time, un derlying temporal logic, temporal constraints used and algorithms employed, have been developed. In this survey, important representational issues whi ch determine a temporal reasoning system are introduced. In particular, sev eral important notions like change, causality, actions are described in ter ms of time. For each issue different choices available in the literature ar e discussed. Tile most influential approaches to temporal reasoning in arti ficial intelligence are analyzed in terms of these major representational i ssues. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.