Representation and Reasoning with Uncertain Temporal Relations

May 1999

Proceedings of the Twelfth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 1999)

Volume

Proceedings of the Twelfth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 1999)

All Papers

It is often necessary to deal with uncertain knowledge and the area of temporal reasoning is not an exception. Basically uncertainty includes two main aspects: inexactness and inconsistency. We suggest representation which includes explicit probability values of the consistent and the inconsistent parts of a temporal relation. The probability of the consistent part of the relation is divided between the basic temporal relations, i.e. (before), = (at the same time), and (after). The inconsistent part of the relation has one probability value which is divided between the three basic relations presenting the percentage values of their support among knowledge sources. Both the probabilities and the percentage values are used in our reasoning mechanism, which consists of three operations: inversion, composition, and addition. These can be used to derive the probability and percentage values for a relation between any two temporal points.