Using incomplete quantitative knowledge in qualitative reasoning

Abstract

Incomplete knowledge of the structure of mechanisms is an important fact of life in reasoning, commonsense or expert, about the physical world. Qualitative simulation captures an important kind of incomplete, ordinal, knowledge, and predicts the set of qualitatively possible behaviors of a mechanism, given a qualitative description of its structure and initial state. However, one frequently has quantitative knowledge as well as qualitative, though seldom enough to specify a numerical simulation.