This paper presents a general method for the diagnosis of active systems, these being artifacts designed to react to some externally generated, unpredictable events. The notion of diagnosis includes, besides the set of faulty components, the concepts of history and dynamic explanation. The diagnostic process is viewed as composed of two tasks, history reconstruction and diagnosis generation. Starting from the available observations of the reaction, which are messages sent by the active system to an observer, the former generates an intensional representation of the (possibly infinite) histories of the systems. Based on this reconstruction, the latter provides the relevant diagnostic information in terms of faulty components, dynamic explanations, and histories.
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