A hitting set tree implementation /

Prior to Raymond Reiter's article 'A Theory of Diagnosis from First Principles', approaches to structural diagnosis were oriented towards boolean and electronic systems. While these methods helped solve many real problems, a general theory of diagnosis remained undiscovered.Reiter's paper presented a general theory of diagnostic reasoning based on behavior and structure. He developed an algorithm for diagnosis but did not produce an implementation.This thesis reviews the theoretical and algorithmic results of Reiter's paper, and then derives the data structures and procedures necessary to implement the theory. We motivate and develop the algorithm based on a correction to Reiter's algorithm and the discovery of other exceptions not apparent in the general theory. We conclude by noting some interesting relationships that could be the basis for further study