Characterizing Temporal Abductive Diagnosis

Several approaches have been proposed to deal with time in diagnosis. The goal of this paper is to propose a logical characterization of diagnosis with temporal knowledge, and, specifically, diagnosis with temporal constraints on the evolution of the system to be diagnosed. The characterization is independent of the specific temporal constraint language being used and is an extension of an abductive characterization of atemporal diagnosis. In a companion paper [ 4 ] we discuss a computational characterization of a restriction of the framework, based on the co-operation of an abductive and a temporal reasoner. 1 Introduction The need of taking into account the temporal dimension in model-based diagnosis has been advocated by many researchers (see, e.g., chapter 6 in [ 17 ] ). While a static model describes the correct and/or faulty behavior of a system (or of its components), at least two different (but related) dimensions of time have been considered in the approaches proposed so far:..