| Abstract
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Understanding the behavior of a structure … Understanding the behavior of a structure and its components at an early stageof design is important in reducing the possibility of costly design revisionat a later stage. We propose a framework for qualitative structural analysisbased on combining first principles of structural behavior with experientialknowledge about structural interpretation.The paper discusses the following issues: (1)representation of structures,fundamental principles, and experiential knowledge, (2) generation of variousmodels of the structure for the purpose of analyzing its behavior, and (3) amethod for qualitative analysis using these models. The purpose of thequalitative analysis is to infer the qualitative response of a givenstructure, expressed by a qualitative deflected shape, moments, and reactions.The reasoning strategy is described as the "greedy" algorithm that tries toexpand the response behavior as much as possible from known parameter values. h as possible from known parameter values.
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