Automated Determination of Qualitative Distinctions: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Results
Martin Sachenbacher, Peter Struß · 2000
Automating the generation of qualitative models at a level that is tailored to support a particular task is crucial to the deployment of model-based systems technologies in practical applications, because reusability of models is of vital importance. If this task cannot be solved, models in a library will either be ineffective, because they are too coarse for solving a particular problem, or inefficient, because they are too fine-grained. The key question to be answered is, "what are the distinctions in the domains of the system variables that are both necessary and sufficient to achieve a particular goal in a certain context and under given conditions?". In our approach, the goal is defined by a set of target partitions of the domains of selected variables (e.g. output variables), the context is given by the structure of the modeled system, and the conditions are represented by a set of initial variables and their possible distinctions (e.g. possible observations). The...