Applying qualitative reasoning techniques for analysis and evaluation in structural design
Gautam Biswas, K. Krishnamurthy, Prodyot K. Basu · 2002
The authors discuss the qualitative reasoning methodologies for analyzing building structures during the preliminary design process. The objective is to build a general tool, an interactive design assistant (IDA) that focuses on the analysis and evaluation aspects of the design process (as opposed to being an automated decision maker). This framework covers a wide variety of situations in the design spectrum. The framework performs the synthesis-analysis-evaluation iteration qualitatively at different levels of abstraction. Trends observed by simulating the effects of changes in design parameter values at a level give useful directions to refine an existing design. The QSIM approach developed by B. Kuipers (1986) models the feasibility, compatibility, and optimizing constraints as a set of qualitative differential equations. QSIM builds a tree of possible behaviors of the mechanism, starting with an initial state defined by an operating region and a set of qualitative values for the physical parameters. Qualitative simulation makes explicit interactions among structural parameters based on which appropriate design choices can be made.>