Temporal Data Modeling and Reasoning for Information Systems

Temporal knowledge representation and reasoning is a major research field in Artificial Intelligence, in Database Systems, and in Web and Semantic Web research. The ability to model and process time and calendar data is essential for many applications like appointment scheduling, planning, Web services, temporal and active database systems, adaptive Web applications, and mobile computing applications. This article aims at three complementary goals. First, to provide with a general background in temporal data modeling and reasoning approaches. Second, to serve as an orientation guide for further specific reading. Third, to point to new application fields and research perspectives on temporal knowledge representation and reasoning in the Web and Semantic Web

Timelines Are Expressive Enough to Capture Action-Based Temporal Planning

Planning problems are usually expressed by specifying which actions can be performed to obtain a given goal. In temporal planning problems, actions come with a time duration and can overlap in time, which noticeably increase the complexity of the reasoning process. Action-based temporal planning has been thoroughly studied from the complexity-theoretic point of view, and has been proved to be EXPSPACE-complete in its general formulation. Conversely, timeline-based planning problems are represented as a collection of variables whose time-varying behavior is governed by a set of temporal constraints, called synchronization rules. Timelines provide a unified framework to reason about planning and execution under uncertainty. Timeline-based systems are being successfully employed in real-world complex tasks, but, in contrast to action-based planning, little is known on their computational complexity and expressiveness. In particular, a comparison of the expressiveness of the action- and timeline-based formalisms is still missing. This paper contributes a first step in this direction by proving the EXPSPACE-completeness of timeline-based planning with no temporal horizon and bounded temporal relations only. The result is shown via a reduction from action-based temporal planning, thus proving that timelines are expressive enough to capture it

Constraint-based evaluation of sequential procedures

Constraining the operation of an agent requires knowledge of the restrictions to physical and temporal capabilities of that agent, as well as an inherent understanding of the desires being processed by that agent. Usually a set of constraints are available that must be adhered to in order to foster safe operations. In the worst case, violation of a constraint may be cause to terminate operation. If the agent is carrying out a plan, then a method for predicting the agent's desires, and therefore possible constraint violations, is required. The conceptualization of constraint-based reasoning used herein assumes that a system knows how to select a constraint for application as well as how to apply that constraint once it is selected. The application of constraint-based reasoning for evaluating certain kinds of plans known as sequential procedures is discussed. By decomposing these plans, it is possible to apply context dependent constraints in production system fashion without incorporating knowledge of the original planning process

Learning Qualitative Constraint Networks

Temporal and spatial reasoning is a fundamental task in artificial intelligence and its related areas including scheduling, planning and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In these applications, we often deal with incomplete and qualitative information. In this regard, the symbolic representation of time and space using Qualitative Constraint Networks (QCNs) is therefore substantial. We propose a new algorithm for learning a QCN from a non expert. The learning process includes different cases where querying the user is an essential task. Here, membership queries are asked in order to elicit temporal or spatial relationships between pairs of temporal or spatial entities. During this acquisition process, constraint propagation through Path Consistency (PC) is performed in order to reduce the number of membership queries needed to reach the target QCN. We use the learning theory machinery to prove some limits on learning path consistent QCNs from queries. The time performances of our algorithm have been experimentally evaluated using different scenarios

Physics-based Motion Planning with Temporal Logic Specifications

One of the main foci of robotics is nowadays centered in providing a great degree of autonomy to robots. A fundamental step in this direction is to give them the ability to plan in discrete and continuous spaces to find the required motions to complete a complex task. In this line, some recent approaches describe tasks with Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) and reason on discrete actions to guide sampling-based motion planning, with the aim of finding dynamically-feasible motions that satisfy the temporal-logic task specifications. The present paper proposes an LTL planning approach enhanced with the use of ontologies to describe and reason about the task, on the one hand, and that includes physics-based motion planning to allow the purposeful manipulation of objects, on the other hand. The proposal has been implemented and is illustrated with didactic examples with a mobile robot in simple scenarios where some of the goals are occupied with objects that must be removed in order to fulfill the task.Comment: The 20th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control, 9-14 July 201

PDDL2.1: An extension of PDDL for expressing temporal planning domains

In recent years research in the planning community has moved increasingly towards application of planners to realistic problems involving both time and many types of resources. For example, interest in planning demonstrated by the space research community has inspired work in observation scheduling, planetary rover ex ploration and spacecraft control domains. Other temporal and resource-intensive domains including logistics planning, plant control and manufacturing have also helped to focus the community on the modelling and reasoning issues that must be confronted to make planning technology meet the challenges of application. The International Planning Competitions have acted as an important motivating force behind the progress that has been made in planning since 1998. The third competition (held in 2002) set the planning community the challenge of handling time and numeric resources. This necessitated the development of a modelling language capable of expressing temporal and numeric properties of planning domains. In this paper we describe the language, PDDL2.1, that was used in the competition. We describe the syntax of the language, its formal semantics and the validation of concurrent plans. We observe that PDDL2.1 has considerable modelling power --- exceeding the capabilities of current planning technology --- and presents a number of important challenges to the research community