BEHAVIORAL PETRI NETS - A MODEL FOR DIAGNOSTIC KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION AND REASONING

Some of the most popular approaches to model-based diagnosis consist o f reasoning about a model of the behavior of the system to be diagnose d by considering a set of observations about such a system and by expl aining it in terms of a set of initial causes. This process has been w idely modeled via logical formalisms essentially taking into account d eclarative aspects. In this paper, a new approach is proposed, where t he diagnostic process is captured within a framework based on the form alism of Petri nets, We introduce a particular net model, called Behav ioral Petri Net (BPN), We show how the formalization of the diagnostic process can be obtained in terms of reachability in a BPN and can be implemented by exploiting classical analysis techniques of Petri nets like reachability graph analysis and P-invariant computation, Advantag es of the proposed methods, like suitability to parallel processing an d exploitation of linear algebra techniques, are then pointed out.