An Efficient Characterization of Fuzzy Temporal Interval Relations

Fuzzy temporal interval relations have been defined to support temporal knowledge representation and reasoning in the presence of vagueness. The most important impediment to use these fuzzy relations in real-world applications is the lack of a characterization that is both easy to implement and computationally efficient. In this paper, we provide such a characterization for the important class of piecewise linear fuzzy time intervals, which covers all types of fuzzy time intervals that we are likely to encounter in applications. Furthermore, we discuss a more elegant characterization for the special case of trapezoidally shaped fuzzy intervals.