Temporal reasoning about composite and/or periodic events

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.