A QUALITATIVE APPROACH TO STRUCTURAL MECHANICS
Giovanni Adorni, M. Burdese, Andrea Del Grosso, R. Loddo, Alessandro Zucchini · 1988
In the field of Civil Engineering, Knowledge Engineering techniques have been applied to safety evaluation, damage assessment and design of structures, but applications are usually limited to specific cases. In this paper, a general approach to structural mechanic problems, based on Qualitative Physics, is discussed, providing the way to model and reason about a wide class of structures as physical devices. Some aspects of the theory proposed by De Kleer and Brown, recognized to be particularly suitable for structural mechanic problems, have been partially reformulated, taking into account the vectorial nature of the problem. The results obtained by the analysis of some plane frame cases provide suggestions to improve the qualitative model of the structures and the process of finding their behavioural description.