Towards a temporal reasoning approach dealing with instance-of, part-of and periodicity

In many application areas, including planning, workflow, guidelines and protocol management, the description of the domain requires the use of part-of relations between events, the modeling of periodic repetitions and the treatment of "standard" temporal constraints between such events. Events in plans, workflows etc. represent "classes", in the sense that they can be instantiated to specific executions of the plan guideline, etc. Of course, such executions must respect (i.e., be consistent with) the temporal constraints explicitly or implicitly (e.g., by the part-of relation) conveyed by the class descriptions. In this paper, we propose a tractable domain-independent temporal server dealing with the above phenomena. We first sketch a representation formalism coping with part-of and instance-of relations, periodicity and temporal constraints, and then we describe two algorithms to deal with inheritance and to perform temporal consistency checking.