High‐speed consistency checking for hypothetical reasoning systems using inference path network

Abstract

AbstractHypothetical reasoning is popular in fault diagnostics and design systems, but slow reasoning speed is its drawback. The goal of the current study is developing hypothetical reasoning based on inference path network, which would overcome this drawback. In hypothetical reasoning systems based on inference path network, there is much room for improvement regarding the computing costs of connotation processing and consistency checking. The authors of this study demonstrate improvement ideas regarding one of these problems, namely, consistency checking. First, the authors obtained necessary and sufficient conditions under which inconsistencies occur during hypothesis composition. Based on the obtained results, the authors proposed an algorithm for speeding up the process of consistency checking. Processing with this algorithm in its core consists in transforming the inference path network in such a way that inconsistencies do not occur during the hypothesis composition, under the condition of unchanged solution hypotheses. The efficiency of this algorithm was confirmed by tests. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 33(9): 109–118, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.1157