SOME IMPROVEMENTS OVER ALLEN'STHEORY OF TIME

Special attention to Allen's theory of time has been paid because of its intuition and easy tounderstand.However,it is not perfect.For example, it cannot handle the continuous change of an event. The objective of this paper is to extend Allen' s theory,and then we put forward a more general frameworkfor the theory of time. our theory is possessed of the following features:(1)subsuming Allen's interval-based theory in our framework; (2)being capable of constructing intervals out of points,and treating intervals and points seperately;(3)giving an efrlciet algorithm of temporal constraint propagation based on 2D graphical representationof the set of time elements.