Trajectory Constraints in Qualitative Simulation

Abstract

We present a method for specifying temporal con-straints on trajectories of dynamical systems and en-forcing them during qualitative simulation. This ca-pability can be used to focus a simulation, simulate non-autonomous and piecewise-continuous systems, reason about boundary condition problems and incor-porate observations into the simulation. The method has been implemented in TeQSIM, a qualitative simu-lator that combines the expressive power of qualitative differential equations with temporal logic. It inter-leaves temporal logic model checking with the simu-lation to constrain and refine the resulting predicted behaviors and to inject discontinuous changes into the simulation. of qualitative states) that satisfy continuous and dis-continuous behavioral requirements specified via tra-jectory constraints’. Figure 1 describes the relation-ship between the sources of constraining power within TeQSIM.