An intensional approach to qualitative and quantitative periodicity-dependent temporal constraints

In this paper we propose a framework for representing and reasoning about qualitative and quantitative temporal constraints about periodic events. In particular our contribution is two-folded: (i) we provide a formalism to deal with both qualitative and quantitative “periodicity-dependent” constraints between repeated events, considering also user-defined periodicities; (ii) we propose an intensional approach to temporal reasoning, which is based on the operations of intersection and composition. Such a comprehensive approach – to the best of our knowledge – represents an innovative contribution, which integrates and extends results from both the Artificial Intelligence and the Temporal Databases literature.