Modelling Temporal Abductive Explanation

Abductive reasoning and temporal reasoning have for the most part remained separate fields of study. Models for either tasks have made overly- simplistic assumptions about the other in order to concentrate on small highly- domain specific tasks. For example, existing abductive models have precluded any temporal information in their formulations whereas temporal models do not address abduction being only concerned with consistency issues. We present a unified approach to merging abductive and temporal reasoning. This approach properly subsumes existing abductive models as well as temporal ones and provides a precise framework for explanatory reasoning. Furthermore, effective algorithms for this new model are developed based on linear programming techniques. Probabilistic reasoning, Constraining satisfaction, Linear programming, Temporal reasoning, Abductive explanation.