REDRAW — a diagrammatic reasoning system for qualitative structural analysis

For preliminary analysis of structures, human engineers often employ diagrams as a visual language to study and to gain intuitive understanding about the behavior of structures. This paper reports a preliminary study and the development of a prototype system for diagrammatic reasoning to better emulate the intuitive visual problem solving techniques of human engineers. Diagrammatic reasoning is a type of reasoning in which the primary means of inference is the direct manipulation and inspection of a diagram. Diagrammatic reasoning is prevalent in human problem-solving behavior, especially for problems involving spatial relationships among physical objects. Our research examines the relationship between diagrammatic reasoning and symbolic reasoning in a computational framework. We have built a system called REDRAW, that emulates the human capability for reasoning with pictures for qualitative analysis of simple frame structures. Diagrammatic representations provide an environment where inferences about the physical results of proposed structural configurations can take place in a more intuitive manner than that possible through purely symbolic representations.