A final frontier: Preferences for Strategies

Michael Schroeder

Abstract

Recent literature points out that strategies are a necessary tool for a model-based diagnoser to cope with large-scale systems. The strategy language proposed by Fröhlich, Nejdl and Schroeder covers all strategies used in literature. But still the language suffers from missing explicit backtracking control. We examine a smart measurement strategy, the problem of combining preference strategy formulas with other formulas and the general case of preferring strategies: all these problems lie beyond the boundaries of the language's expressivity. In the core of the paper we show how to overcome these limits by enriching the language by an additional operator. We define the semantics of the operator and show how the problems motivating the extension are solved.

Keywords: Model-based Diagnosis, Modal Logics, Strategies, Preferences

The full paper is available as a postscript file .