On the usefulness of re-using diagnostic solutions

Recent studies on planning, comparing plan re-use and plan generation, have shown that both the above tasks may have the same degree of computational complexity, even if we deal with very similar problems. The aim of this paper is to show that the same kind of results apply also for diagnosis. We propose a theoretical complexity analysis coupled with some experimental tests, intended to evaluate the adequacy of adaptation strategies which re-use thesolutions of past diagnostic problems in order to build a solution to the problem to be solved. Results of such analysis show that, even if diagnosis re-use falls into the same complexity class of diagnosis generation (they are both NP-complete problems), practical advantages can be obtained by exploiting a hybrid architecture combining case-based and model-based diagnostic problem solving in a unifying framework.