Constraint-Based Temporal Reasoning

by Roman Barták, Robert A. Morris and K. Brent Venable

The representation of temporal information, and reasoning about time, are important in artificial intelligence. Reasoning about time plays a critical role in building automated planning and scheduling systems, where causal and temporal relations are the most critical concepts. The tutorial introduces to core concepts of constraint-based temporal reasoning. In particular, it will describe the classical temporal models, both qualitative and quantitative, and relevant reasoning (consistency) techniques, and it will cover extensions of these models towards representing preferences and uncertainty. Example applications will also be listed.

The tutorial is targeted especially to PhD students and researchers that need to employ temporal reasoning in their systems. No specific prior knowledge is required beyond the basic understanding of logic and algorithms.

The tutorial is based on the book “An Introduction to Constraint-based Temporal Reasoning” published by Morgan & Claypool.