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Summary: Abstract
Temporal constraints play a fundamental role in
clinical guidelines. For example, temporal indeter-
minacy, constraints about duration, delays between
actions, and periodic repetitions of actions are es-
sential in order to cope with clinical therapies. In
this paper, we propose a computer-based approach
to represent temporal constraints in clinical guide-
lines and reason (i.e., perform inferences in the
form of constraint propagation) with them. We first
propose a temporal representation formalism and
two constraint propagation algorithms operating on
it, and then we show how they can be exploited in
order to provide clinical guideline systems with
different temporal facilities. Our approach offers
several advantages: for example, during the guide-
line acquisition phase, it enables to represent tem-
poral constraints, and to check their consistency;
during the execution phase, it allows to check the
consistency between action execution-times and
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