The lower and upper limits must be numeric.
The dissimilarity between time periods is calculated as the ratio of the overlap of the time periods (distance in the case of disjoint time periods) to the cumulative extent of the two time periods.
As the ratio is bounded between -1 and 1, we add 1 to make it positive and normalise it so that it is between 0 and 1.
This overlap index then needs to be transformed into a dissimilarity index between sets. To do this we use the 1 - ratio. It is equal to 0 if the two time periods are identical and 1 if they are infinitely different.