Modeling Physical Systems Qualitatively

■ We examine different formalisms for modeling qualitatively physical systems and their associated inferential processes that allow us to derive quali-tative predictions from the models. We highlight the mathematical aspects of these processes along with their potential and limitations. The article then bridges to quantitative modeling, highlight-ing the benefits of qualitative reasoning–based ap-proaches in the framework of system identifica-tion, and discusses open research issues