Authors: Terenziani, Paolo¹; Anselma, Luca²

Source: Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Volume 18, Number 1, March 2006 , pp. 87-115(29)

Publisher: Taylor and Francis Ltd

Abstract:

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 goal of our work is to propose an approach dealing with the above-mentioned temporal phenomena. To achieve such an objective, the authors propose a tractable domain-independent temporal reasoner. This enhances the generality of our approach, which provides a domain-independent module that can be integrated with other software tools to solve temporal problems in specific domains. From the methodological point of view, the authors first devise a representation formalism coping with the aforesaid phenomena, and then they describe temporal constraint propagation algorithms to deal with constraint inheritance and to perform temporal consistency checking. The representation formalism has been designed carefully, to obtain algorithms that are both complete and tractable. Finally, the paper also shows experimental results, including an application of the authors' approach to clinical guidelines, evaluating their impact on future applications and research activities.

Keywords: Temporal reasoning; Temporal constraints; Classes and instances; Composite events; Periodic events

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528130500412050

Affiliations: 1: Dipartimento di Informatica, Università del Piemonte Orientale `Amedeo Avogadro', via Bellini 25/g, Alessandria, Italy 2: Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Corso Svizzera 185, 10149 Torino, Italy

Publication date: 2006-03-01

More about this publication?

• Editorial Board
• Information for Authors
• Subscribe to this Title
• ingentaconnect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites

Related content

• In this: publication
• By this: publisher
• In this Subject: Computer Science
• By this author: Terenziani, Paolo ;  Anselma, Luca

Website © Publishing Technology. Article copyright remains with the publisher, society or author(s) as specified within the article.

• Terms and conditions
• Privacy policy
• Information for advertisers