The ability to answer prediction questions is crucial to reasoning about physical systems. A prediction question poses a hypothetical scenario and asks for the resulting behavior of variables of interest. Prediction questions can be answered by simulating a model of the scenario. An appropriate system boundary, which separates aspects of the scenario that must be modeled from those that can be ignored, is critical to achieving a simple yet adequate model. This paper presents an efficient algorithm for system boundary selection, it shows the important role played by the model's time scale, and it provides a separate algorithm for selecting this time scale. Both algorithms have been implemented in a compositional modeling program called TRIPEL and evaluated in the plant physiology domain.

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In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), pp. 1191--1198, Cambridge, MA 1994. AAAI/MIT Press.

@inproceedings{rickel:aaai94, title={Automated Modeling for Answering Prediction Questions: Selecting the Time Scale and System Boundary}, author={J. Rickel and Bruce Porter }, booktitle={Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94)}, address={Cambridge, MA}, publisher={AAAI/MIT Press}, pages={1191--1198}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?rickel:aaai94", year={1994} }