A Tool for Qualitative Causal Reasoning On Complex Systems

A cognitive map, also called a mental map, is a representation and reasoning model on causal knowledge. It is a directed, labeled and cyclic graph whose nodes represent causes or effects and whose arcs represent causal relations between these nodes such as “increases”, “decreases”, “supports”, and “disadvantages”. A cognitive map represents beliefs (knowledge) which we lay out about a given domain of discourse and is useful as a means of decision making support. There are several types of cognitive maps but the most used are fuzzy cognitive maps. This last treat the cases of existence and no nexistence of relations between nodes but does not deal with the case when these relations are indeterminate. Neutrosophic cognitive maps proposed by F. Smarandache [1] make it possible to take into account these indetermination and thus constitute an extension of fuzzy cognitive maps. This article tries to propose a modeling and reasoning tool for complex systems based on neutrosophic cognitive maps. In order to be able to evaluate our work, we applied our tool to a medical case which is the viral infection biological process.