Affiliations: LIPN, University Paris-Nord, 93430 Villetaneuse, France. E-mail: Philippe.Dague@ura1507.univ-paris13.fr
Note: [] MQ&D is the French ‘Modélisation Qualitative et Décision’ group. It was created in November 1988 by L. Travé-Massuyès (LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse) within the GDR (‘Groupe De Recherche’) ‘Automatique’ of the CNRS (‘Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’). Since mid-1991 it has also been part of the PRC-GDR (‘Pôle de Recherches Coordonnées’ of the Ministry of Research and ‘Groupe De Recherche’ of the CNRS) ‘Intelligence Artificielle’. It is presently managed by L. Travé-Massuyès and P. Dague and groups together around 50 members (half of them being active participants and the other half being observers) who are mainly researchers (academic or industrial) in AI and Automatics. The following members have contributed to this paper: P. Bourseau, K. Bousson, P. Dague, J.-L. Dormoy, J.-M. Evrard, F. Guerrin, L. Leyval, O. Lhomme, B. Lucas, A. Missier, J. Montmain, N. Piera, N. Rakoto-Ravalontsalama, J.-P. Steyer, M. Tomasena, L. Travé-Massuyès, M. Vescovi, S. Xanthakis and B. Yannou.
Abstract: After preliminary work in economics and control theory, qualitative reasoning emerged in AI at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, in the form of Naïve Physics and Commonsense Reasoning. This way was progressively abandoned in aid of more formalised approaches to tackle modelling problems in engineering tasks. Qualitative Reasoning became a proper subfield of AI in 1984, the year when several seminal papers developed the foundations and the main concepts that remain topical today. Since then Qualitative Reasoning has considerably broadened the scope of problems addressed, investigating new tasks and new systems, such as natural systems. This paper gives a survey of the development of Qualitative Reasoning from the 80s, focusing on the present state-of-the-art of the mathematical formalisms and modelling techniques, and presents the principal domains of application through the applied research done in France.
