Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems with Multiple Perspective

My dissertation describes an approach to automatically formulating or selecting models of a target physical system for a given qualitative reasoning task. It was motivated by two observations regarding modeling in general and work in qualitative physics in particular. First, all model-based reasoning is only as good as the model used (Davis and Hamscher 1988). Second, no single model is adequate or appropriate for a wide range of tasks (Weld 1989).