A Design Based Approach to Constructing Computational Solutions to Diagnostic Problems

Troubleshooting problems in real manufacturing environments impose constraints on admissible solutions that make the computational solutions offered by "troubleshooting from first principles" and the conventional experience based expert systems approaches infeasible. In this paper we present a computational theory for a solution to these problems that is based on the Principle of Locality and exploits the domain specific weak methods of troubleshooters and debugging knowledge of the designers. The computational theory is evaluated by generating focus of attention heuristics for a moderately complex digital device.