Tutorial on Temporal Representation and Reasoning in Interval Temporal Logics (ECAI 2014)
Angelo Montanari, Pietro Sala, and Dario Della Monica
Abstract
The tutorial aims at giving an account on research in interval temporal logics, with a
particular attention to the fragments of Halpern and Shoham's modal logic of time intervals.
Interval-based temporal reasoning naturally arises in a variety of AI areas, including knowledge
representation and reasoning, temporal planning and maintenance, temporal constraints, theories
of actions and events, and event processing. Moreover, it plays a significant role in other fields
of computer science, such as theoretical computer science, temporal databases, and computational
linguistics.
Our goal is to give an up-to-date and comprehensive description of the state of the art in the
field of interval temporal logics. We will illustrate methods and techniques that have been used
to deal with the most relevant problems, namely, expressiveness, decidability and complexity of
the satisfiability and model checking problems, and reasoning techniques. A special emphasis will
be given to the tableau-based methods for interval temporal reasoning. We will conclude the tutorial
with a short list of open problems and current research directions.
The natural target of the tutorial are PhD students and researchers who are interested in logical
approaches to AI problems. In addition, it is definitely of interest to people dealing with temporal
representation and reasoning issues in classical AI application domains, such as, for instance, planning,
synthesis, and model-based reasoning.
There are no specific prerequisites, apart from some familiarity with the basics of (propositional)
logic and complexity theory. Background knowledge about modal and (point-based) temporal logics would
help, but it is not necessary.
The structure of the tutorial:
Part I: a road map;
Part II: decision procedures and tableau systems;
Part III: expressiveness issues.