Temporal reasoning about composite and/or periodic events

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 approach 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.