ETAI Newsletter Actions and Change

ETAI Newsletter on
Reasoning about Actions and Change


Issue 97006 Editor: Erik Sandewall 7.10.1997

The ETAI is organized and published under the auspices of the
European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).

ETAI Publications

Received research articles

The following article has been received by the present ETAI area, which means that it will be open for a three-month discussion period, followed by the closed peer-review decision on whether it will be accepted by the ETAI. All readers of this Newsletter are invited to participate in the discussion.

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Michael Thielscher

A Theory of Dynamic Diagnosis.

[interactions]

Abstract: Diagnosis is, in general, more than a mere passive reasoning task. It often requires to actively produce observations by performing a test series on a faulty system. We present a theory of diagnosis which captures this dynamic aspect by appealing to Action Theory. The reactions of a system under healthy condition are modeled as indirect effects, so-called ramifications, of actions performed by the diagnostician. Under abnormal circumstances - i.e., if certain aspects or components of the system are faulty-one or more of these ramifications fail to materialize. Ramifications admitting exceptions is shown to giving rise to a hitherto unnoticed challenge - a challenge much like the one raised by the famous Yale Shooting counter-example in the context of the Frame Problem. Meeting this challenge is inevitable when searching for "good" diagnoses. As a solution, we adapt from a recent causality-based solution to the Qualification Problem the key principle of initial minimization. In this way, when suggesting a diagnosis our theory of dynamic diagnosis exploits causal information, in addition to possibly available, qualitative knowledge of the a priori likelihood of components to fail.

Some of the results in this paper have been preliminarily reported in (Thielscher, 1997a).

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