Abductive reasoning: Encyclopedia II - Abductive reasoning - Applications

Abductive reasoning - Applications

Abduction has been applied in artificial intelligence for various tasks. The most direct application of abduction is that of automatically detect faults in systems: given a theory relating faults and manifestation and a set of manifestations (the visible effects of faults), abduction can be used to derive some set of faults that are likely to be the cause of the problem.

Abduction can also be used to model automated planning. Given a logical theory relating action occurrences with their effects (for example, a formula of the event calculus), the problem of finding a plan for reaching a state can be modeled as the problem of abducing a sequence of literals implying that the final state is the goal state.

Belief revision, the process of adapting beliefs in view of new information, is another field in which abduction has been applied. The main problem of belief revision is that the new information may be inconsistent with the corpus of beliefs, while the result of the incorporation cannot be inconsistent. This process can be done by the use of abduction: once an explanation for the observation has been found, integrating it does not generate inconsistency. This use of abduction is not straighforward, as adding propositional formulae to other propositional formulae can only make inconsistencies worst. Instead, abduction is done at the level of the ordering of preference of the possible worlds.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Applications", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki