Towards a Theory of Qualitative Reasoning about Mechanisms and its Role in Troubleshooting (original) (raw)

Human Detection and Diagnosis of System Failures, 1981

Abstract

One of the intriguing properties of many expert trouble-shooters is their ability to diagnose systems that they have never seen before. These experts construct their own qualitative causal models of how a system functions given a description of its structure and what it is supposed to do. What is the basis of this skill? Towards answering this question, we have been investigating properties of the “mental models” that such experts might be constructing for representing the underlying mechanisms of a system, i.e. their understanding. Some of these properties are apparent. Firstly, they involve a qualitative understanding of how the system functions in contradistinction to the analytic or quantitative models often taught to engineers. Secondly, these models appear to have many of the properties of a simulation which is, metaphorically speaking, “run” in the mind’s eye or what might be called an envisionment. From running such an envisionment the expert can discover and/or encode much of a system’s underlying causality.

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