An extended qualitative multi-faults diagnosis from first principles I: Theory and modelling

This paper is part I of a two part effort that is intended to present a framework of multi-faults diagnosis. Reiter has proposed a consistency-based approach for multi-faults diagnosis. We extend his theory to deal with the dynamic and continuous systems and offer a necessary assumption and a formal demonstration. Multi-faults diagnosis is a partially observable problem because there is usually not enough information about faults. So the STRIPS, a classic technique of automated planning, is chosen to build the system model. It provides the reasoning ability for the multi-faults diagnosis when diagnosis is formalized as reasoning from effects to causes with causal knowledge.