Managing Temporal Constraints with Preferences: Representation, Reasoning, and Querying

Representing and managing temporal knowledge, in the form of temporal constraints, is a crucial task in many areas, including knowledge representation, planning, and scheduling. The current literature in the area is moving from the treatment of 'crisp' temporal constraints to fuzzy or probabilistic constraints, to account for preferences and\or uncertainty. Given a set of temporal constraints, the evaluation of the tightest implied constraints is a fundamental task, which is essential also to provide reliable query-answering facilities. However, while such tasks have been widely addressed for 'crisp' temporal constraints, they have not attracted enough attention in the 'non-crisp' context yet. We overcome such a limitation, by (i) extending quantitative temporal constraints to cope with preferences, (ii) defining a temporal reasoning algorithm which evaluates the tightest temporal constraints, and (iii) providing suitable query-answering facilities based on it.