A spectrum of logical definitions of model-based diagnosis

In this paper, we analyze the logical definitions of model-based diagnosis recently presented in the literature, and we propose a unified framework (based on the integration of abductive and consistency-based reasoning) in which most of such definitions can be captured. This allows us to single out the existence of a spectrum of alternatives in the logical definition of diagnosis. A lot of attention in the paper is devoted to analyzing the differences among the definitions in the spectrum. In particular, we show that the definitions can be compared on the basis of their restrictiveness and we relate such a restrictiveness with the completeness of the model of the system to be diagnosed.