Metric Constraints for Maintaining Appointments: Dates and Repeated Activities

Abstract

Reasoning about one's personal schedule of appointments is a common but surprisingly complex activity. Motivated by the novel application of planning and temporal reasoning techniques to this problem, we have extended the formalization of the temporal distance model of Dechter, Meiri, and Pearl. We have developed methods for using dates as reference intervals and for meeting the challenge of repeated activities, such as weekly recurring appointments. Introduction Intelligently managing a busy personal schedule is not an easy task, but it is a ubiquitous one. The benefit to be derived from an automated facility for maintaining an appointment calendar---with all of the complex constraint management that that entails 1 ---is potentially enormous. In the context of CLASM, 2 an intelligent appointment manager, we have begun to explore the utility of AI methods for maintaining a library of complex activity descriptions, verifying whether an activity is possible, and checking the cons...