Towards Embedded Qualitative Simulation | A Specialized Computer Architecture for QSim

Qualitative simulation is a key inference technique of model-based reasoning and is successfully demonstrated in areas like monitoring, fault-diagnosis and design. For industrial applications, embedded qualitative simulation is required, i.e., the qualitative simulator is coupled with the physical process by a set of sensors and actuators. Often the qualitative simulator must additionally satisfy real-time constraints. To advance embedded applications of the qualitative simulator QSim, we have developed a special-purpose computer architecture. The design of this computer architecture is based on parallelization and SW to HW migration. The main features of this design are (i) high-performance, (ii) scalability and (iii) increased portability to embedded platforms. The prototype implementation and the experimental results demonstrate the suitability of our approach for embedded qualitative simulation. keywords: qualitative simulator QSim real-time AI parallel processing SW/HW migration