A Qualitative Reasoning System for Behaviours in Interactive Systems

This paper describes an environment for the development of qualitative simulation applications in the context of interactive systems: QPVis. At the heart of QPVis is an implementation of Qualitative Process Theory (QPT) which is designed to be extensible and to allow the definition of new kinds of behaviours / interactions within the world. Another objective was to retain real-time and interactive behaviour whilst allowing multiple instances of the same processes to be active. The QPVis is a new platform for the extension of qualitative process theory into the area of interactive systems. We describe the foundations and ideas for QPVis and show how it extends QPT to the context of interactive systems, producing a new environment for qualitative reasoning research.