About Real Time, Calendar Systems and Temporal Notions

Abstract

A specification language is presented for describing every day temporal notions, like weekends, holidays, office hours etc. The time model underlying this language exploits in a particular way the well investigated algorithms for calendar systems currently in use. All peculiarities and irregularities of the calendar systems, like time zones, leap years, daylight savings time are respected. The specification language and the underlying temporal model allows us to convert between arbitrary calendar systems and to decide a number of questions, for example whether a certain point in time is within the time intervals specified by a term in this language. Besides neglecting the phenomena of relativity theory, there are no idealizing assumptions. The language is the basis for a temporal logic with quantifiers over real time temporal notions.

This work was supported by EPSRC Research Grant GR/K57282.