Integrating orientation, distance and time for qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning

Most previous qualitative spatial or spatio-temporal reasoning researches focused only on a single aspect, and in fact those were inadequate for practical applications. This paper studies the representation of orientation, distance, time and their interrelations, and then a representation and reasoning technique that integrates orientation, distance and time information is presented. It can determine the position relations between two spatial entities after a period of time. While the model comes out to be concise in expressing and easy for reasoning, it integrates spatial and temporal information effectively. The model in this paper has potential applications in areas as diverse as Geographical Information System (GIS), spatio-temporal database and robotic navigation.