In the modern world, we are permanently using, leveraging, interacting with, and relying upon systems of ever higher sophistication, ranging from our cars, recommender systems in e-commerce, and networks when we go online, to integrated circuits when using our PCs and smartphones, the power grid to ensure our energy supply, security-critical software when accessing our bank accounts, and spreadsheets for financial planning and decision making. The complexity of these systems coupled with our high dependency on them implies both a non-negligible likelihood of system failures, and a high potential that such failures have significant negative effects on our everyday life. For that reason, it is a vital requirement to keep the harm of emerging failures to a minimum, which means minimizing the system downtime as well as the cost of system repair. This is where model-based diagnosis comes into play. Model-based diagnosis is a principled, domain-independent approach that can be generally applied to troubleshoot systems of a wide variety of types, including all the ones mentioned above, and many more. It exploits and orchestrates i.a. techniques for knowledge representation, automated reasoning, heuristic problem solving, intelligent search, optimization, stochastics, statistics, decision making under uncertainty, machine learning, as well as calculus, combinatorics and set theory to detect, localize, and fix faults in abnormally behaving systems. In this thesis, we will give an introduction to the topic of model-based diagnosis, point out the major challenges in the field, and discuss a selection of approaches from our research addressing these issues.

翻译：在现代世界中，我们持续使用、利用、交互并依赖着日益复杂的系统，包括汽车、电子商务中的推荐系统、上网时的网络、使用个人电脑和智能手机时的集成电路、保障能源供应的电网、访问银行账户时涉及的安全关键型软件，以及用于财务规划和决策的电子表格。这些系统的复杂性加上我们对它们的高度依赖，既意味着系统故障的发生概率不可忽视，也意味着此类故障可能对我们的日常生活产生显著的负面影响。因此，将突发故障的危害降至最低是一项至关重要的需求，即最小化系统停机时间以及维修成本。这正是基于模型的诊断发挥作用之处。基于模型的诊断是一种原则性、领域无关的方法，可普遍用于排查各种类型的系统，包括上述所有系统及更多系统。它利用并协调了知识表示、自动推理、启发式问题求解、智能搜索、优化、随机过程、统计学、不确定性决策、机器学习，以及微积分、组合数学和集合论等技术，以检测、定位并修复异常行为系统中的故障。在本文中，我们将介绍基于模型诊断这一主题，指出该领域的主要挑战，并讨论我们研究中针对这些问题的部分方法。