Eventualities

Antony Galton

Chapter 2 of M. Fisher, D. Gabbay and L. Vila (eds.), Handbook of Temporal Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence, Elsevier, 2005, pages 25-58. ISBN 0-444-51493-7.

Section headings

• Introduction
• One state in discrete time
  • The simplest possible temporal system
  • Instantaneous transitions
  • Can a state hold at an instant?
  • A state holding for a while: the operator Po
  • Events and their occurrences
  • A state holding for a certain duration
  • Repetition events
  • Sequential composition of events
  • An event in progress: the operator Prog
  • Completed events: the operator Perf
  • Frequency of occurrence
  • Processes and activities
• Systems with finitely-many states in discrete time
  • One many-valued state vs many binary states
  • State-spaces, adjacency, and quasi-continuity
  • Instantaneous and durative transitions
  • Formal and material progressive operators
  • Formal and material perfect-tense operators
  • Logical operations on states
  • Logical operations on events
• Finite-state systems in continuous time
• Continuous state-spaces
• Case study: a game of tennis