Temporal Reasoning with Classes and Instances of Events

Representing and reasoning with both temporal constraints between classes of events (e.g., between the types of actions needed to achieve a goal) and temporal constraints between instances of events (e.g., between the specific actions being executed) is a ubiquitous task in many areas of computer science, such as planning, workflow, guidelines and protocol management. The temporal constraints between the classes of events must be inherited by the instances, and the consistency of both types of constraints must be checked. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose domain-independent knowledge server dealing with these issues. In particular, we propose a formalism to represent temporal constraints, we show two algorithms to deal with inheritance and to perform temporal consistency checking, and we study the properties of the algorithms.