Reference: Round, A. D. QSOPS: A Workbench Environment For The Qualitative Simulation of Physical Processes. 1987.
Abstract: The QSOPS system is an attempt to provide an intelligent environment for the qualitative simulation of complex physical processes, developed in the domain of bacterial moecular genetics. This environment was achieved through the integration of description, simulation, and animation components. The description component provides an interface that allows the user to specify attributes for the processes to be simulated and the objects on which they act. The simulation component uses attribute values from the description component to track the concentrations of objects over time with rules that dynamically compute the frequencies of the processes that create or destroy these objects as well as the lifetimes of the objects. The attribute values from the description component and the process frequencies computed in the simulation compnonent are used to drive the animation component, which provides an intuitively meaningful visual depiction of the processes undergoing simulation. The QSOPS simulation environment is designed to be gernalizable to apply to any physical system that involves a finite number of objects undergoing discrete transformations.