Real-world applications of qualitative reasoning

Qualitative reasoning has attracted much interest from the artificial intelligence research community in the last decade. The emphasis in qualitative reasoning on making inferences about the behavior of physical systems where there is incomplete information makes the technology relevant to many real-world industrial problems. Many applications of qualitative reasoning technology have emerged for such tasks as diagnosis, design, tutoring, real-time monitoring and hazard identification. This article showcases some of these recent applications.