A Concurrent, Distributed Architecture for Diagnostic Reasoning

  • Authors:

  • Stefano A. Cerri;Vincenzo Loia

  • Affiliations:

  • Dipartimento di Scienze dell‘/Informazione, Università/ di Milano, via Comelico 39, 20135 MILANO, Italy: e-mail: cerri@dsi.unimi.it/;Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni, Università/ di Salerno, 84081 Baronissi (SA), Italy/ e-mail: loia@dia.unisa.it

  • Venue:
  • User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

This paper demonstrates the feasibility ofmodeling concurrent diagnostic reasoning (CDR) bymeans of the computational model of actors. Actorshave a value added on top of objects, because theyinclude the properties of abstraction, modularity andreuse of objects but allow really concurrent anddistributed architectures, in the sense that memory(the environment) is assumed not to be shared amongactors. Whether concurrency really implies efficiencyis still debated. We are more concerned here with theactor-based design of the diagnostic reasoning model.As a testimony of the feasibility of our proposal, aconcrete, actor-based diagnostic program is presentedas a module for an Intelligent Tutoring System in thedomain of school algebra. CDR is obtained from thecoordinated behaviour of actors which possess limitedlocal knowledge and accomplish the global goal ofdiagnostic reasoning by interacting with each other.We examine how the ’traditional‘ approaches to studentmodeling, such as overlay and bug models, can bere-visited in a distributed perspective ofcomputational actors and how the latter viewoutperforms the previous ones.