Exploiting qualitative reasoning in the automated modeling of visco-elastic materials

Describes part of an implemented system for the automated modeling of the mechanical behavior of materials. The paper focuses on the qualitative aspects. More precisely, it describes an algorithm for the qualitative simulation of the response of a visco-elastic material to both creep and relaxation experiments, and discusses some problems related to the qualitative interpretation of the experimental data. The authors´ qualitative simulation algorithm is restricted to creep and relaxation experiments which are the most commonly performed because of the simplicity of their implementation with respect to the richness of the captured information