A critique of qualitative simulation from a consolidation viewpoint

To understand commonsense reasoning, it is necessary to discover what kinds of problems a commonsense reasoner should be able to solve, what the reasoner needs to have in order to solve those problems, and the relationships among the various kinds of problem-solving abilities. Four methods for performing qualitative reasoning about the behaviour of physical situations are examined. Three of the methods perform qualitative simulation, which determines the behavior of a situation by a qualitative version of simulation methods. The other method is called consolidation, which derives the behavior of a situation by composing the behavior of the situation´s components. The work shows that qualitative simulation and consolidation work on different problems of qualitative reasoning, and that their differences and similarities lead to several implications about their role in qualitative reasoning