Abstract
Many connections have been established in recent years between Chemistry and Computer Science, and very accurate systems, based on mathematical and physical models, have been suggested for the analysis of chemical substances. However, such a systems suffer from the difficulties of processing large amount of data, and their computational cost grows largely with the chemical and physical complexity of the investigated chemical substances. This prevent such kind of systems from their practical use in many applicative domain, where complex chemical compound are involved. In this paper we proposed a formal model, based on qualitative chemical knowledge, whose aim is to overcome such computational difficulties. The model is aimed at integrating ontological and causal knowledge about chemical compounds and compound transformations. The model allowed the design and the implementation of a system, that is based on the well known Heuristic Search paradigm, devoted to the automatically resolution of chemical formulation problems in the industrial domain of rubber compounds.