UI-98), Bremen, 1998

Environmental decision support involves different tasks like assessing the current situation from observations, diagnosing the causes of undesirable developments and planning therapy actions in order to improve the situation. While these task are knowledge intensive, we find that techniques of consistency-based diagnosis that have been successfully applied for component structures of technical devices can profitably be generalized to cover the mentioned tasks for a wider range of systems. We present a generalized theory of model-based diagnosis handling a variety of compositional modeling techniques (like the Qualitative Process Theory). This also provides formal logical foundations and the possibility to utilize existing computational tools