My. Kiang et al., REASONING IN QUALITATIVELY DEFINED SYSTEMS USING INTERVAL-BASED DIFFERENCE-EQUATIONS, IEEE transactions on systems, man, and cybernetics, 25(7), 1995, pp. 1110-1120
Citations number
36
Categorie Soggetti
Controlo Theory & Cybernetics","Computer Science Cybernetics","Engineering, Eletrical & Electronic
Quantitative research and statistical techniques have long been regard
ed as superior ways of analyzing knowledge in social sciences. To deal
with incomplete or imprecise knowledge while modeling systems, tradit
ional approaches in social sciences (i.e., management science, operati
ons research) have attempted to measure social facts by making approxi
mations of the problem under analysis, Recent Artificial Intelligence
(AI) research on qualitative reasoning which focuses on using qualitat
ive knowledge to reason about the everyday physical world, suggests an
opportunity to extend the capability of current logicomathematical in
struments used by social scientists, This paper proposes an interval p
ropagation difference equation method, a type of qualitative-quantitat
ive simulation method, to model dynamic systems by abstracting from th
e underlying true model, The proposed difference equation method can b
e used to model problems requiring discrete-time analysis, such as app
lications involving time-lag relationships, Moreover, the method does
not require the exact functional form of the problem under analysis to
be known with certainty, The incomplete or imprecise knowledge availa
ble about the functional form of the true model, and the values of its
variables, are represented with bounding functions and interval value
s respectively.