Qualitative Spatial And Temporal Reasoning With And/Or Linear Programming

This paper explores the use of generalized linear programming techniques to tackle two long-standing problems in qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning: Using LP as a unifying basis for reasoning, one can jointly reason about relations from different qualitative calculi. Also, concrete entities (fixed points, regions fixed in shape and/or position, etc.) can be mixed with free variables. Both features are important for applications but cannot be handled by existing techniques. In this paper we discuss properties of encoding constraint problems involving spatial and temporal relations. We advocate the use of AND/OR graphs to facilitate efficient reasoning and we show feasibility of our approach.