Consistency‐Based Problem Solving for Environmental Decision Support

Complex systems do not always behave as we would like them to. With the complexity of the system, be it a water treatment plant, an ecological system or a tech- nical device, the tasks of situation assessment (finding out what is the actual state of the system) and therapy recog- nition (finding out what can be done to influence it in a desirable direction again) require more and more complex reasoning. This paper proposes a general approach to computational support for these tasks, namely consistency- based problem solving. Building upon research in model- based systems and, more specifically, consistency-based diagnosis, we have developed a revision and generaliza- tion of traditional (component-oriented) theories and tech- niques of diagnosis from first principles. Our approach is both more general in terms of the class of problems to be addressed and more specific by proposing and exploiting a structured representation of system and domain knowl- edge. A motivating example from the domain of water treatment will facilitate the presentation of the theory of consistency-based problem solving and the description of an implemented reasoning system, the Generalized Diag-

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