DYNAMIC ACROSS-TIME MEASUREMENT INTERPRETATION
Incrementally maintaining a qualitative understanding of physical system behavior based on observations is crucial to tasks such as real-time control, monitoring, and diagnosis. This paper describes the DATMI theory for interpretation tasks. The key idea of DATMI is to dynamically maintain a concise representation of the space of local and global interpretations across time that are consistent with the observations. This representation has two key advantages. First, a set of possible interpretations is more useful than a single (best) candidate for many tasks, such as conservative monitoring. Second, this representation simplifies switching to alternative interpretations when data are faulty or incomplete. Domain-specific knowledge about state and transition probabilities can be used to suggest the interpretation which is most likely. Domain-specific knowledge about durations of states and paths of states can also be used to further constrain the interpretation space. When no consistent interpretation exists, faulty-data hypotheses are generated and then tested by adjusting the interpretation space. The DATMI theory has been tested via implementation and we describe its performance on two examples.
interpretation qualitative physics