234,763 research outputs found
An Integrated First-Order Theory of Points and Intervals over Linear Orders (Part I)
There are two natural and well-studied approaches to temporal ontology and
reasoning: point-based and interval-based. Usually, interval-based temporal
reasoning deals with points as a particular case of duration-less intervals. A
recent result by Balbiani, Goranko, and Sciavicco presented an explicit
two-sorted point-interval temporal framework in which time instants (points)
and time periods (intervals) are considered on a par, allowing the perspective
to shift between these within the formal discourse. We consider here two-sorted
first-order languages based on the same principle, and therefore including
relations, as first studied by Reich, among others, between points, between
intervals, and inter-sort. We give complete classifications of its
sub-languages in terms of relative expressive power, thus determining how many,
and which, are the intrinsically different extensions of two-sorted first-order
logic with one or more such relations. This approach roots out the classical
problem of whether or not points should be included in a interval-based
semantics
Analysing imperfect temporal information in GIS using the Triangular Model
Rough set and fuzzy set are two frequently used approaches for modelling and reasoning about imperfect time intervals. In this paper, we focus on imperfect time intervals that can be modelled by rough sets and use an innovative graphic model [i.e. the triangular model (TM)] to represent this kind of imperfect time intervals. This work shows that TM is potentially advantageous in visualizing and querying imperfect time intervals, and its analytical power can be better exploited when it is implemented in a computer application with graphical user interfaces and interactive functions. Moreover, a probabilistic framework is proposed to handle the uncertainty issues in temporal queries. We use a case study to illustrate how the unique insights gained by TM can assist a geographical information system for exploratory spatio-temporal analysis
The Energetic Reasoning Checker Revisited
Energetic Reasoning (ER) is a powerful filtering algorithm for the Cumulative
constraint. Unfortunately, ER is generally too costly to be used in practice.
One reason of its bad behavior is that many intervals are considered as
relevant by the checker of ER, although most of them should be ignored. In this
paper, we provide a sharp characterization that allows to reduce the number of
intervals by a factor seven. Our experiments show that associating this checker
with a Time-Table filtering algorithm leads to promising results.Comment: CP Doctoral Program 2013, Uppsala : Sweden (2013
An Integrated First-Order Theory of Points and Intervals over Linear Orders (Part II)
There are two natural and well-studied approaches to temporal ontology and
reasoning: point-based and interval-based. Usually, interval-based temporal
reasoning deals with points as a particular case of duration-less intervals. A
recent result by Balbiani, Goranko, and Sciavicco presented an explicit
two-sorted point-interval temporal framework in which time instants (points)
and time periods (intervals) are considered on a par, allowing the perspective
to shift between these within the formal discourse. We consider here two-sorted
first-order languages based on the same principle, and therefore including
relations, as first studied by Reich, among others, between points, between
intervals, and inter-sort. We give complete classifications of its
sub-languages in terms of relative expressive power, thus determining how many,
and which, are the intrinsically different extensions of two-sorted first-order
logic with one or more such relations. This approach roots out the classical
problem of whether or not points should be included in a interval-based
semantics. In this Part II, we deal with the cases of all dense and the case of
all unbounded linearly ordered sets.Comment: This is Part II of the paper `An Integrated First-Order Theory of
Points and Intervals over Linear Orders' arXiv:1805.08425v2. Therefore the
introduction, preliminaries and conclusions of the two papers are the same.
This version implements a few minor corrections and an update to the
affiliation of the second autho
Unifying Practical Uncertainty Representations: II. Clouds
There exist many simple tools for jointly capturing variability and
incomplete information by means of uncertainty representations. Among them are
random sets, possibility distributions, probability intervals, and the more
recent Ferson's p-boxes and Neumaier's clouds, both defined by pairs of
possibility distributions. In the companion paper, we have extensively studied
a generalized form of p-box and situated it with respect to other models . This
paper focuses on the links between clouds and other representations.
Generalized p-boxes are shown to be clouds with comonotonic distributions. In
general, clouds cannot always be represented by random sets, in fact not even
by 2-monotone (convex) capacities.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, Pre-print of journal paper to be published in
International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (with expanded section
concerning clouds and probability intervals
Modal Logics of Topological Relations
Logical formalisms for reasoning about relations between spatial regions play
a fundamental role in geographical information systems, spatial and constraint
databases, and spatial reasoning in AI. In analogy with Halpern and Shoham's
modal logic of time intervals based on the Allen relations, we introduce a
family of modal logics equipped with eight modal operators that are interpreted
by the Egenhofer-Franzosa (or RCC8) relations between regions in topological
spaces such as the real plane. We investigate the expressive power and
computational complexity of logics obtained in this way. It turns out that our
modal logics have the same expressive power as the two-variable fragment of
first-order logic, but are exponentially less succinct. The complexity ranges
from (undecidable and) recursively enumerable to highly undecidable, where the
recursively enumerable logics are obtained by considering substructures of
structures induced by topological spaces. As our undecidability results also
capture logics based on the real line, they improve upon undecidability results
for interval temporal logics by Halpern and Shoham. We also analyze modal
logics based on the five RCC5 relations, with similar results regarding the
expressive power, but weaker results regarding the complexity
Rethinking Pointer Reasoning in Symbolic Execution
Symbolic execution is a popular program analysis technique that allows seeking for bugs by reasoning over multiple alternative execution states at once. As the number of states to explore may grow exponentially, a symbolic executor may quickly run out of space. For instance, a memory access to a symbolic address may potentially reference the entire address space, leading to a combinatorial explosion of the possible resulting execution states. To cope with this issue, state-of-the-art executors concretize symbolic addresses that span memory intervals larger than some threshold. Unfortunately, this could result in missing interesting execution states, e.g., where a bug arises. In this paper we introduce MemSight, a new approach to symbolic memory that reduces the need for concretization, hence offering the opportunity for broader state explorations and more precise pointer reasoning. Rather than mapping address instances to data as previous tools do, our technique maps symbolic address expressions to data, maintaining the possible alternative states resulting from the memory referenced by a symbolic address in a compact, implicit form. A preliminary experimental investigation on prominent benchmarks from the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge shows that MemSight enables the exploration of states unreachable by previous techniques
Expert systems tools for Hubble Space Telescope observation scheduling
The utility of expert systems techniques for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) planning and scheduling is discussed and a plan for development of expert system tools which will augment the existing ground system is described. Additional capabilities provided by these tools will include graphics-oriented plan evaluation, long-range analysis of the observation pool, analysis of optimal scheduling time intervals, constructing sequences of spacecraft activities which minimize operational overhead, and optimization of linkages between observations. Initial prototyping of a scheduler used the Automated Reasoning Tool running on a LISP workstation
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