Affiliations: IIIA, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, CEAB, Camí de Sta. Bàrbara, s/n, 17300 Blanes, Catalonia, Spain, E-mail: vila@ceab.es
Note: [] This work has been supported by the MEC of the Spanish government under a FPI fellowship (ref. PN90 77909683) and by the CICYT under the ARREL project (TIC92-0579-C02-01). Part of this work has been developed during a stage at the Laboratoire d'Automatique et Analyse de Systemes (Toulouse, France).
Abstract: The notion of time is uniquitous in any activity that requires intelligence. In particular, several important notions like change, causality, action are described in terms of time. Therefore, the representation of time and reasoning about time is of crucial importance for many Artificial Intelligence systems. Specifically during the last 10 years, it has been attracting the attention of many AI researchers. In this survey, the results of this work are analysed. Firstly, Temporal Reasoning is defined. Then, the most important representational issues which determine a Temporal Reasoning approach are introduced: the logical form on which the approach is based, the ontology (the units taken as primitives, the temporal relations, the algorithms that have been developed, …) and the concepts related with reasoning about action (the representation of change, causality, action, …). For each issue the different choices in the literature are discussed.
