Skip to main content

Satisfiability of quantitative temporal constraints with multiple granularities

  • Session 7a
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1330))

Abstract

Most work on temporal constraints has ignored the subtleties involved in dealing with multiple time granularities. This paper considers a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) where binary quantitative constraints in terms of different time granularities can be specified on a set of variables, and unary constraints are allowed to limit the domain of variables. Such a CSP cannot be trivially reduced to one of the known CSP problems. The main result of the paper is a complete algorithm for checking consistency and finding a solution. The complexity of the algorithm is studied in the paper under different assumptions about the granularities involved in the CSP, and a second algorithm is proposed to improve the efficiency of the backtracking process needed to obtain all the solutions of the CSP.

The work of Wang and Jajodia was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under the grant IRI-9633541.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. James F. Allen. Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Communications of the ACM, 26(11):832–843, November 1983.

    Google Scholar 

  2. C. Bettini, X. Wang, and S. Jajodia. A General Framework for Time Granularity and its Application to Temporal Reasoning. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, to appear. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Proc. of TIME-96, IEEE Computer Society Press.

    Google Scholar 

  3. R. Dechter, I. Meiri, and J. Pearl. Temporal constraint networks. Artificial Intelligence, 49:61–95, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  4. P. Ladkin. Time representation: a taxonomy of interval relations. In Proc. of the American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos, CA, pp. 360–366, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  5. P. Ladkin. The completeness of a natural system for reasoning with time intervals. In Proc. of the Intern. Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos, CA, pp. 462–467, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  6. A. K. Mackworth. Consistency in networks of relations. Artificial Intelligence, 8:99–118, 1977.

    Google Scholar 

  7. A. K. Mackworth and E. C. Freuder. The complexity of some polynomial network consistency algorithms for constraint satisfaction problems. Artificial Intelligence, 25:65–74, 1985.

    Google Scholar 

  8. I. Meiri. Combining qualitative and quantitative constraints in temporal reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 87:343–385, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  9. U. Montanani. Networks of constraints: Fundamental properties and applications to picture processing. Information Science, 7(3):95–132, 1974.

    Google Scholar 

  10. L. Khatib, R.A. Morris, W.D. Shoaff. Path consistency in a network of nonconvex intervals. In Proc. of the Intern. Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, pp. 655–661, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  11. M. Poesio and R. J. Brachman. Metric constraints for maintaining appointments: Dates and repeated activities. In Proc. of the American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press/MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA, pp. 253–259, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  12. E. Schwalb and R. Dechter. Processing disjunctions in temporal constraint networks. Artificial Intelligence. To appear.

    Google Scholar 

  13. P. van Beek and R. Cohen. Exact and approximate reasoning about temporal relations. Computational Intelligence, 6:132–144, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Gert Smolka

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Bettinn, C., Wang, X.S., Jajodia, S. (1997). Satisfiability of quantitative temporal constraints with multiple granularities. In: Smolka, G. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming-CP97. CP 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1330. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017458

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017458

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-63753-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69642-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics