This is similar to what I deal with at work, where we have a large number of devices (dare I say "IoT") that all send data to a cloud system. There's the time t

This is similar to what I deal with at work, where we have a large number of devices (dare I say "IoT") that all send data to a cloud system. There's the time that each record was recorded, the time it was sent, the time it was actually picked up from the queue for processing, and so on. It also arises in ETL systems like Apache Airflow, where the "logical date" of a task run might or might not correspond to the date it was actually run. The common element here is that the time relationships are not monotonic, and you occasionally have to make business decisions around that non-monotonicity.