QUALITATIVE REASONING - A SURVEY OF TECHNIQUES AND APPLICATIONS

After preliminary work in economics and control theory, qualitative re asoning emerged in Al at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, in the form of Naive Physics and Commonsense Reasoning. This way was p rogressively abandoned in aid of more formalised approaches to tackle modelling problems in engineering tasks. Qualitative Reasoning became a proper subfield of Al in 1984, the year when several seminal papers developed the foundations and the main concepts that remain topical to day. Since then Qualitative Reasoning has considerably broadened the s cope of problems addressed, investigating new tasks and new systems, s uch as natural systems. This paper gives a survey of the development o f Qualitative Reasoning from the 80s, focusing on the present state-of -the-art of the mathematical formalisms and modelling techniques, and presents the principal domains of application through the applied rese arch done in France.