Fault diagnosis under temporal constraints

The authors describe an approach to associating temporal knowledge with a diagnostic system. They present a summary of work done in developing an algebra of relations for temporal reasoning, and proceed to extend the work using an interval based approach, but incorporating point intervals in the model. A propositional calculus representation of the temporal relations is derived and combined with the transitive closure algorithm that operates on a bit matrix. The result is an efficient and relatively simple approach to modeling relations between temporal intervals and propagating the constraints imposed by these relations through the knowledge base.<>