Commonsense reasoning, in particular qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning (QSTR), provides flexible and intuitive methods for reasoning about vague and uncertain information including spatial orientation, topology and proximity.  Despite a number of theoretical advances in QSTR, there are relatively few applications that employ these methods.  The central problem is a significant lack of application level standards and validation methods for supporting developers in adapting and integrating QSTR with their domain specific qualitative spatial and temporal models.  To address this we present a significantly novel methodology for QSTR application validation, inspired by research in software engineering.  In this paper we focus on unit testing, and adapt the software engineering strategy of defining boundary cases.  We present two critical boundary concepts, a methodology for isolating the units under testing from other parts of the model, and methods to assist the designer in integrating our critical boundary unit testing approach with a broader validation plan.

Many applications -- from planning and scheduling to problems in molecular biology -- rely heavily on a temporal reasoning component. In this paper, we discuss the design and empirical analysis of algorithms for a temporal reasoning system based on Allen's influential interval-based framework for representing temporal information. At the core of the system are algorithms for determining whether the temporal information is consistent, and, if so, finding one or more scenarios that are consistent with the temporal information. Two important algorithms for these tasks are a path consistency algorithm and a backtracking algorithm. For the path consistency algorithm, we develop techniques that can result in up to a ten-fold speedup over an already highly optimized implementation. For the backtracking algorithm, we develop variable and value ordering heuristics that are shown empirically to dramatically improve the performance of the algorithm. As well, we show that a previously suggested reformulation of the backtracking search problem can reduce the time and space requirements of the backtracking search. Taken together, the techniques we develop allow a temporal reasoning component to solve problems that are of practical size.

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