Towards an Integrated Logic of Space, Time and Motion

In this paper we show how Allen’s temporal logic, with the modifications suggested byGalton to enable it to accommodate continuityphenomena, can be combined with the spatial logic of Randall, Cui and Cohn to yield a useful framework for reasoning about the motion of a rigid body in space. The idea of a perturbation is introduced as the key to providing a qualitative account of continuity, and a set of axioms is given from which an important result called the Perturbation Principle is derivable. Finally it is shown how the system enables various types of events to be defined in terms of their conditions of occurrence.