A multi-viewpoint system to support abductive reasoning

The paper proposes a multi-viewpoint system to support human abductive reasoning for diagnosis, prognosis and trial-and-error activities for supervising automated systems. This multi-viewpoint approach interprets the same set of events from the different viewpoints in this set. The algorithms for managing these viewpoints and the set of events are related to hypothetical reasoning, and they use several main functions to (1) select or reject certain events, (2) cancel or recover these events, and (3) manage the consistency of the viewpoints. This approach is applied to diagnosis and trial-and-error activities related to the phone troubleshooting problem.