Reasoning at Runtime using time-distorted Contexts: A Models@run.time based Approach

Intelligent systems continuously analyze their context to autonomously take corrective actions. Building a proper knowledge representation of the context is the key to take adequate actions. This requires numerous and complex data models, for example formalized as ontologies or meta-models. As these systems evolve in a dynamic context, reasoning processes typically need to analyze and compare the current context with its history. A common approach consists in a temporal discretization, which regularly samples the context (snapshots) at specific timestamps to keep track of the history. Reasoning processes would then need to mine a huge amount of data, extract a relevant view, and finally analyze it. This would require lots of computational power and be time-consuming, conflicting with the near real-time response time requirements of intelligent systems. This paper introduces a novel temporal modeling approach together with a time-relative navigation between context concepts to overcome this limitation. Similarly to time distortion theory, our approach enables building time-distorted views of a context, composed by elements coming from different times, which speeds up the reasoning. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with a smart grid load prediction reasoning engine. Keywords—Temporal data, Time-aware context modeling, Knowledge representation, Reactive systems, Intelligent systems