  A new generation of experiments is being developed, where the challenge of
separating rare signal processes from background at high intensities requires a
change of trigger paradigm. At the future PANDA experiment at FAIR, hardware
triggers will be abandoned and instead a purely software-based system will be
used. This requires novel reconstruction methods with the ability to process
data from many events simultaneously.
  A 4D tracking algorithm based on the cellular automaton has been developed
which will utilize the timing information from detector signals. Simulation
studies have been performed to test its performance on the foreseen
free-streaming data from the PANDA detector. For this purpose, a quality
assurance procedure for tracking on free-streaming data was implemented in the
PANDA software. The studies show that at higher interaction rates, 4D tracking
performs better than the 3D algorithm in terms of efficiency, 84% compared to
77%. The fake track suppression is also greatly improved, compared to the 3D
tracking with roughly a 50% decrease in the ghost rate.
