A novel approach to qualitative prediction

Qualitative analysis has increasingly become a main analysis tool for handling complex dynamical systems. In qualitative analysis, Qualitative Prediction Problem is one of the central problems of qualitative modeling for a system. At present, qualitative modeling approaches cannot solve effectively this problem because they employ unsuitable manner of qualitative modeling. In this paper, by proposing the notion of ternary qualitative function as qualitative model structure for complex systems and developing a few specific constructive methods to generate such functions directly on the qualitative information available, we build a novel direct qualitative modeling approach. By applying the novel approach to an example, it is illustrated that the approach can be used to solve effectively the Qualitative Prediction Problem.