The chemical plant management qualitative support system

The aim of this paper was to capture the benefits of common sense qualitative reasoning about process phenomena as displayed in the human behavior mental model. The control features of qualitative modeling and simulation were qualitative variable description and logic rules for manipulating variable values between systematic states. The additional measure of qualitative information value was introduced. This study is the first report in the literature showing the measure of qualitative information value. Qualitative simulation was applied to the fault diagnosis of a chemical system. The obtained results illustrated the goodness of the estimation of system behavior during an abnormal situation. The developed qualitative simulator for fault diagnosis generates original scenarios and can serve as a useful aid to a system operator