ABSTRACT
The development of qualitative models of physical systems is currently a worldwide research community. It consists of a set of eclectic techniques designed to generate a qualitative description of the behavior of physical systems from a description of its structure, a set of initial conditions, and some initial “disturbance.” The motivation for the initial work in qualitative reasoning came from the development of an Intelligent Tutoring System for trouble-shooting electronic circuits, called Sophie III. Dynamic system simulation is an increasingly important form of qualitative reasoning. An exciting theme in the utilization of qualitative reasoning techniques is in the development of multiple models of the system that can be used for a variety of purposes. However, the developers of the qualitative modeling techniques usually have one of the above motivations as the primary goal. One of the obvious approaches to the utilization of Artificial Intelligence techniques within Control attempts to use Expert System techniques as an adjunct to conventional methods.
