Spatial reasoning in a fuzzy region connection calculus

  • Authors:

  • Steven Schockaert;Martine De Cock;Etienne E. Kerre

  • Affiliations:

  • Ghent University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Krijgslaan 281 -- S9, 9000 Gent, Belgium;Ghent University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Krijgslaan 281 -- S9, 9000 Gent, Belgium;Ghent University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Krijgslaan 281 -- S9, 9000 Gent, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Although the region connection calculus (RCC) offers an appealing framework for modelling topological relations, its application in real-world scenarios is hampered when spatial phenomena are affected by vagueness. To cope with this, we present a generalization of the RCC based on fuzzy set theory, and discuss how reasoning tasks such as satisfiability and entailment checking can be cast into linear programming problems. We furthermore reveal that reasoning in our fuzzy RCC is NP-complete, thus preserving the computational complexity of reasoning in the RCC, and we identify an important tractable subfragment. Moreover, we show how reasoning tasks in our fuzzy RCC can also be reduced to reasoning tasks in the original RCC. While this link with the RCC could be exploited in practical reasoning algorithms, we mainly focus on the theoretical consequences. In particular, using this link we establish a close relationship with the Egg-Yolk calculus, and we demonstrate that satisfiable knowledge bases can be realized by fuzzy regions in any dimension.