Defeasible Temporal Reasoning

Abstract

This work is involved with the confluence of two areas of artiñcial intelligence (AI) called “defeasible reasoning” and “temporal reasoning”. The work can be briefly described as the extensión of a particular kind of defeasible reasoning systems, called “argumentative systems”, to allow them to use temporal references. The importance of this study is given by the intensive usefulness of temporal concepts in Computer sience. At the same time there are several areas in AI where time plays a fundamental role. Since the goal is to capture human abilities in solving problems, to consider temporal concepts is unavoidable. An intelligent agent makes a decisive use of temporal references in its communica- tion and its deductive processes. For example, in natural language written text comprehension, medical diagnosis elaboration, faults detection and in planning systems for industrial applications or robots.