Reasoning about intervals in two dimensions

Qualitative reasoning approaches take on the challenge of dealing with commonsense knowledge in machines. This is important both to provide a means of efficient automatic reasoning and to overcome the differences between man and machine. This paper proposes a new qualitative representation of spatial knowledge based on interval relations. The representation complements existing approaches by providing a new set of spatial relations. This allows qualitative reasoning about rigid objects, for example, in spatial configuration problems or in the context of spatio-temporal interactions between objects. The qualitative nature of this representation assists the engineering process and makes the behaviour of systems more easily comprehensible.