A qualitative diagnostic method based on structural analysis for a circulatory system model

The purpose of this study is to develop a diagnosis and simulation tool for a circulatory system model. We use Coleman´s (1979) dynamic model Human, which consists of 25 modules including equations of about 1000 lines, over 200 variables, and over 100 static parameters. We propose a qualitative method for understanding causal propagation of variables in the model structure. The proposed method: generates cause and effect relations between variables; visualizes a hierarchical directed graph of variables; and enables to trace the hierarchy of the circulatory model