Efficient Processing of Queries and Assertions about Qualitative and Quantitative Temporal Constraints

A critical problem for managers of temporal information is the treatment of assertions and of complex types of queries because in many cases the treatment could involve reasoning on the whole knowledge base of temporal constraints. We propose an efficient approach to this problem. First, we show how different types of queries can be answered (in a complete way) in a time polynomial in the dimension of the query and independently of the dimension of the knowledge base. Second, we provide an efficient (and complete) procedure to deal with sessions of interleaved assertions and queries to the knowledge base. We provide both analytical and experimental evaluations of our approach, and we discuss some application areas.