Distributed Constraint Propagation for Diagnosis of Faults in Physical Processes

Most of the current research on distributed diagnosis in and for multiagent systems focuses on diagnosis of coordination failures. Proposed approaches for this problem are not efficient for diagnosing failures in physical devices. This paper proposes algorithms for distributed troubleshooting of physical devices and processes. The consequences of using distributed representation of the knowledge, ATMS, and distributed reasoning are discussed and algorithms are proposed to deal with the occurrence of conflicts and the computation of the set of candidate diagnosis