Qualitative reasoning involves expressing and deriving knowledge based on
qualitative terms such as natural language expressions, rather than strict
mathematical quantities. Well over 40 qualitative calculi have been proposed so
far, mostly in the spatial and temporal domains, with several practical
applications such as naval traffic monitoring, warehouse process optimisation
and robot manipulation. Even if a number of specialised qualitative reasoning
tools have been developed so far, an important barrier to the wider adoption of
these tools is that only qualitative reasoning is supported natively, when
real-world problems most often require a combination of qualitative and other
forms of reasoning. In this work, we propose to overcome this barrier by using
ASP as a unifying formalism to tackle problems that require qualitative
reasoning in addition to non-qualitative reasoning. A family of ASP encodings
is proposed which can handle any qualitative calculus with binary relations.
These encodings are experimentally evaluated using a real-world dataset based
on a case study of determining optimal coverage of telecommunication antennas,
and compared with the performance of two well-known dedicated reasoners.
Experimental results show that the proposed encodings outperform one of the two
reasoners, but fall behind the other, an acceptable trade-off given the added
benefits of handling any type of reasoning as well as the interpretability of
logic programs. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.

这篇论文提出了使用 ASP 作为一个统一的形式化语言来解决需要定性推理和非定性推理的问题，提出了一族可以处理任何二进制关系资料的 ASP 编码，并且在真实数据集的实验中进行了评估。

基于 Answer Set Programming 的定性理论编码和推理的一般方法

A Generalised Approach for Encoding and Reasoning with Qualitative  Theories in Answer Set Programming

Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning (QSTR) is concerned with symbolic
knowledge representation, typically over infinite domains. The motivations for
employing QSTR techniques range from exploiting computational properties that
allow efficient reasoning to capture human cognitive concepts in a
computational framework. The notion of a qualitative calculus is one of the
most prominent QSTR formalisms. This article presents the first overview of all
qualitative calculi developed to date and their computational properties,
together with generalized definitions of the fundamental concepts and methods,
which now encompass all existing calculi. Moreover, we provide a classification
of calculi according to their algebraic properties.

文章综述了目前发展的定性演算，及其计算特性，并提供了按代数属性分类的计算方法概述。