Experiences on Empirical Assessment of Rule-based AI Systems for Ecological Modelling

In working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques,more specifically logic-based knowledgerepresentation and reasoning, applied to environmentalmodelling, again more specifically, to automatingaspects of construction of ecological simulationmodels of the system dynamics kind, I havehad a couple of opportunities to work on projectswhere comparative empirical assessments of systemswere performed. More and more, the degree ofcomplexity of AI systems renders them unsuitablefor purely theoretical analytical studies, compellingus to resort to empirical methods which throughdata can flesh out the workings of a system and helpus understand its behaviour and results.