Collaborative Assistance with Spatio-temporal Planning Problems

The paper describes a collaborative assistance approach with spatiotemporal planning, which requires user’s active participation in the problem solving task. The proposed collaborative assistance system operates on a region-based representation structure, which allows for partial specification of constraints at different levels of granularity. Weakly specified constraints contribute on the one hand to high computational complexity when generating alternative solutions and on the other hand to large solution spaces. The paper introduces Partial Order, Neighboring Regions and Partial Order of Neighboring Regions heuristics, which allow for pruning of significant parts of the search space, and produce hierarchical structuring of the solution space. Resulting hierarchical organization of the solution space reflects human mental processing of geographic information. To reduce cognitive load during observation of solution space, filtering of certain aspects, set-oriented structuring and case-based reasoning approaches are introduced.