Temporal Constraints: A Survey

  • Authors:

  • Eddie Schwalb;Lluís Vila

  • Affiliations:

  • Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA;Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence (IIIA)–CSIC, Catalonia, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Constraints
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Temporal Constraint Satisfaction is an informationtechnology useful for representing and answering queries abouttemporal occurrences and temporal relations between them. Informationis represented as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) wherevariables denote event times and constraints represent the possibletemporal relations between them. The main tasks are two: (i)deciding consistency, and (ii) answering queries about scenariosthat satisfy all constraints. This paper overviews resultson several classes of Temporal CSPs: qualitative interval, qualitative point, metric point, and some of their combinations. Research has progressed along three lines: (i) identifyingtractable subclasses, (ii) developing exact search algorithms,and (iii) developing polynomial-time approximation algorithms. Most available techniques are based on two principles: (i)enforcing local consistency (e.g. path-consistency) and (ii)enhancing naive backtracking search.