Qualitative Modeling and Simulation of Socio-Economic Phenomena

This paper describes an application of recently developed qualitative reasoning techniques to complex, socio-economic allocation problems. We explain why we believe traditional optimization methods are inappropriate and how qualitative reasoning could overcome some of these shortcomings. A case study is presented where an authority is expected to devise a policy that satisfies certain constraints. We describe how sets of rules of thumb implementing such a policy can be analyzed and validated by the decision maker using a program which automatically builds and simulates qualitative models of the underlying dynamical system. Such a program constructs and simulates models from incomplete descriptions of initial states and functional relationships between variables. We show that it nevertheless gives sufficient information to the decision maker.