Multi-Agent Diagnosis with semantically distributed knowledge

We consider the problem of finding a commonly agreed upon diagnosis for errors observed in a system monitored by a number of different expert agents, each having its own specialized view on the system. That is, the expert agents have to agree on one or more diagnoses based on their specialized views of the system. Reaching an agreement is complicated by the two factors: ( i) different specialisms need not distinguish the same fault modes of a component and ( ii ) knowledge of different specialisms need not be correct in some cases. This paper analyzes these problems and presents protocols that enable the agents to deal with these issues.