IWASAKI@C.CS.CMU.EDU (Yumi Iwasaki) (05/28/86)
I will be presenting my thesis proposal as follows: Date : Tuesday, June 3, 1986 Time : 2 pm Place : WeH 5409 Title : Model-Based Reasoning of Device Behavior with Causal Ordering Causality plays an important role in human understanding of the world. While a number of artificial intelligence systems have been built that reason with causal knowledge, few have addressed the issue of not only representing and using causal knowledge but also of discovering causal relations in the domain based on an operational definition of causality. We propose to study discovering, representing, and using causal knowledge based on the definition of causal relations given by the theory of causal ordering. The proposed scheme for causal reasoning has several levels of representation of knowledge, namely the network representation of processes, equation model of components, and causal ordering structure. The scheme links the knowledge at the level of intuitive understanding of processes to the diagnostic level via an intermediate, more formal model represented as a system of equations. In this research, we will study application of the concept of causal ordering to a task of reasoning about physical device behavior by implementing a causal reasoning program, ACORD, in the domain of a coal power plant. We also expect to contribute to better understanding of advantages and disadvantages of model-based and evidential reasoning.