Formal Properties of Constraint Calculi for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning.
Bernhard Nebel, Alexander Scivos · 2002
In the previous two decades, a number of qualitative constraint calculi have been developed, which are used to represent and reason about spatial configurations. A common property of almost all of these calculi is that reasoning in them can be understood as solving a binary constraint satisfaction problem over infinite domains. The main algorithmic method that is used is constraint propagation in the form of the path-consistency method. This approach can be applied to a wide range of different aspects of spatial reasoning. We describe how to make use of this representation and reasoning technique and point out the possible problems one might encounter.