Toward Embedded Qualitative Simulation: A Specialized Computer Architecture for QSim

QUALITATIVE SIMULATION IS A key inference technique of model-based reasoning that has found use in such areas as monitoring, fault diagnosis, and design. To advance embedded applications of the qualitative simulator QSim, we have developed a special-purpose computer architecture designed to provide high performance, scalability, and increased portability to embedded computer platforms in mind. To demonstrate our approach’s suitability for embedded qualitative simulation, we have developed a prototype implementation on a heterogeneous multiprocessor system. As this article discusses, this prototype improves QSim’s performance by two orders of magnitude.