Troubleshooting: When Modeling Is the Trouble

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 6

Engineering Problem Solving

This paper shows how order of magnitude reasoning has been successfully used for troubleshooting complex analog circuits. The originality of this approach was to be able to remove the gap between the information required to apply a general theory of diagnosis and the limited information actually available. The expert’s ability to detect a defect by reasoning about the significant changes in behavior it induces is extensively exploited here: as a kind of reasoning that justifies the qualitative modeling, as a heuristic that defines a strategy and as a working hypothesis that makes clear the scope of this approach.