An approach to diagnosing multiple procedural faults

In diagnosing incorrect results arising from faulty procedures we are required to indicate not only types but also locations of the faults involved. It is relatively easy to simulate the procedure when only a single fault is involved. But the diagnosis becomes considerably more difficult when multiple faults are compounded with a possibility of migration. In this paper a conditional grammar is presented which facilitates decomposition of a complicated procedure into simple procedures and representation of control knowledge. The grammar can describe any multiple procedural faults at any level by decomposing the procedure if necessary. Effective parsing is possible if it is under the guidance of control knowledge represented by the grammar. We applied this grammar to a diagnostic system of subtraction errors, which is based on a so-called buggy model and is constructed in the environment of a knowledge-base system called ADS (Aion Development System), Its parser searches diagnoses in a space reduced by a control knowledge processing sub-system.<>