Diagnosis of plans and agents

  • Authors:
  • Nico Roos;Cees Witteveen

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht;Faculty EEMCS, Delft University of Technology, Delft

  • Venue:
  • CEEMAS'05 Proceedings of the 4th international Central and Eastern European conference on Multi-Agent Systems and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

We discuss the application of Model-Based Diagnosis in (agent- based) planning. Here, a plan together with its executing agent is considered as a system to be diagnosed. It is assumed that the execution of a plan can be monitored by making partial observations of the results of actions. These observations are used to explain the observed deviations from the plan by qualifying some action instances that occur in the plan as behaving abnormally. Unlike in standard model-based diagnosis, however, in plan diagnosis we cannot assume that actions fail independently. We focus on two sources of dependencies between failures: such failings may occur as the result of malfunctioning of the executing agent or may be caused by dependencies between action instances occurring in a plan. Therefore, we introduce causal rules that relate health states of the agent and health states of actions to abnormalities of other action instances. These rules enable us to determine the underlying causes of plan failing and to predict future anomalies in the execution of actions.