Toward a Reformalization of QSIM
Benjamin Shults · 1996
A more detailed formalization of part of the QSIM framework has been found to be useful. That formalization is presented here in brief. The new formalization makes it easier to make and prove some useful statements. The formalization of temporal reasoning about continuous systems [7] and the precise definition of completeness are examples of the usefulness of this formalization. 1 Introduction In many applications in which ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are used, complete information about initial conditions or the specific relationship between a pair of quantities is not completely known. In some cases constants are known to lie in a certain range or the relationship between quantities is only known to be monotonic. Qualitative reasoning allows this information to be used to generate descriptions of solutions to any ODE which abstracts to the known information. We call such an abstract ODE a qualitative differential equation (QDE). In many such applications we want to draw co...