---
title: "Diagnosis of Communicating Systems: Dealing with Incompleteness and Uncertainty"
authors:
  - "Marc Riese"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1993/205"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1993/0205.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1993
pages: "1480-1486"
track: "Qualitative Reasoning and Naive Physics"
keywords:
---

# Diagnosis of Communicating Systems: Dealing with Incompleteness and Uncertainty

Marc Riese

*Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1480-1486.

## Abstract

Systems with state, such as simple sequential circuits, can sometimes be modelled at a high-level of abstraction or encapsulated as a single component in order to diagnose their behaviour. However, for distributed systems and complex state machines, such encapsulation may not be appropriate and high-level abstraction may offer insufficient detail for diagnosis. Here state evolution must be dealt with more directly. This paper presents a novel algorithm, called HMDP (Heuristic Model-based Diagnosis of communication Protocols), for device-independent interpretation of observations and diagnosis of communicating agents1 in distributed discrete systems, such as communication networks. A fundamental motivation of the HMDP is to deal with problems of incompleteness and uncertainty of observations, and tractability problems incurred by detailed diagnosis . These problems are addressed by: heuristic and approximate matching and interpretation techniques; an incremental propagation technique; use of temporal information; and reiteration on subsets of conflicts.