A PROCESS-ORIENTED REASONER ABOUT PHYSIOLOGY

This paper presents the RAP system: a reasoner about physiology. RAP p erforms two tasks: (1) it infers the behaviour of a complex physiologi cal process using the behaviours of its subprocesses and the relations hips between them; (2) it reasons about the effect of introducing a fa ult into the model. In order to reason about the behaviour of a comple x process, RAP uses a mechanism which: (i) represents how subprocesses behave; (ii) establishes how these subprocesses affect each others be haviors; (iii) 'aggregates' these behaviors together to obtain the beh avior of the top level process; (iv) gives that process a temporal con text in which to act. RAP uses limited commonsense knowledge about fau lts to reason about their effect in terms of the generation of new pro cesses and the misbehavior of existing ones. The effects are then prop agated throughout the model to obtain the overall effect of the fault. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.