Constraint Propagation Algorithms for Temporal Reasoning

Marc Vilain, Henry Kautz

This paper considers computational aspects of several temporal representation languages. It investigates an interval-based representation, and a point-based one. Computing the consequences of temporal assertions is shown to be computationally intractable in the interval-based representation, but not in the point-based one. However, a fragment of the interval language can be expressed using the point language and benefits from the tractability of the latter.
