Automatic generation of explanations: AGE

Explaining how engineering devices work is important to students, engineers, and operators. In general, machine generated explanations have been produced from a particular perspective. This paper introduces a system called automatic generation of explanations (AGE) capable of generating causal, behavioral, and functional explanations of physical devices in natural language. AGE explanations can involve different user selected state variables at different abstraction levels. AGE uses a library of engineering components as building blocks. Each component is associated with a qualitative model, information about the meaning of state variables and their possible values, information about substances, and information about the different functions each component can perform. AGE uses: (i) a compositional modeling approach to construct large qualitative models, (ii) causal analysis to build a causal dependency graph, (iii) a novel qualitative simulation approach to efficiently obtain the system’s behavior on large systems, and (iv) decomposition analysis to automatically divide large devices into smaller subsystems. AGE effectiveness is demonstrated with different devices that range from a simple water tank to an industrial chemical plant. r 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.