Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Constraints in Temporal Reasoning

This paper presents a general model for temporal reasoning that is capable of handling both qualitative and quantitative information. This model allows the representation and processing of many types of constraints discussed in the literature to date, including metric constraints (restricting the distance between time points) and qualitative, disjunctive constraints (specifying the relative position of temporal objects). Reasoning tasks in this uni ed framework are formulated as constraint satisfaction problems and are solved by traditional constraint satisfaction techniques, such as backtracking and path consistency. New classes of tractable problems are characterized, involving qualitative networks augmented by quantitative domain constraints, some of which can be solved in polynomial time using arc and path consistency. This work was supported in part by grants from the Air Force O ce of Scienti c Research, AFOSR 900136, and the National Science Foundation, IRI 8815522.