Excerpt from Order of Magnitude Reasoning in Qualitative Differential Equations
The paper is organized as Section 2 presents fundamental definitions and rules that govern the behavior of a solution to a set of qualitative differential equations. The basis of the definitions and the justifications of the rules lie in the theory of non-standard analysis with infinitesimals. Section 3 shows how these rules may be applied in the heavy block on the spring example and other examples. Section 4 presents an algorithm for constructing an envisionment graph from a set of qualitative differential equations. Section 5 discusses the chepachet program, which implements this algorithm. Section 6 makes suggestions for further work. We assume that the reader is familiar with standard theories of envisionment.