Goals and functions of the human body: an MFM model for fault diagnosis

Describes the use of explicit models of goals and functions for monitoring and diagnosis of intensive-care patients. The method is based on multilevel flow models (MFM) and used in the Guardian system. It provides this system with alarm analysis, fault diagnosis, and automatic generation of explanations. Advantages include a relatively easy knowledge engineering effort and good properties for use in a system with hard real time deadlines. The results of some experiments are also reported