A model for reasoning about bidimensional temporal relations
Résumé
This paper introduces the rectangle algebra as the power set of the set of the pairs of atomic relations which can hold between two rational intervals. It goes on proving that the question of the consistency of a rectangle network which constraints are preconvex is decidable by means of the path-consistency method in time polynomial in the length of the network. 1 Introduction Temporal and spatial dependencies between data constitute the reason for existence of several problems in computer science : geographical information systems, natural language understanding, specification and verification of programs and systems, temporal and spatial databases, temporal and spatial planification, etc. Those who tackled these problems proposed numerous models for reasoning about time and space, the objects they considered as well as the relations between these objects distinguishing one of these models from the others. As an illustrative example, the model of the intervals proposed by Al...