Within this topic, we have investigated the use of meta level reasoning and distributed agents for diagnosis-, repair-, reconfiguration- and control-tasks in industrial applications.
The fact, that these tasks overlap in time and the necessity to use different models in order to represent the different kinds of knowledge, leads to considerable coordination and conflict resolution problems.
We examine how to solve these tasks with distributed agents. Among others the following questions will be discussed: How to distribute the different tasks, how to efficiently coordinate a set of agents, which advantages result from the use of distributed intelligence in these domains and which existing kinds of organizations could be used.
Formal meta-level reasoning mechanisms for model-based diagnosis (incorporating languages and semantics preferences and strategies in a diagnostic context) are discussed in [21], [22] and [4], first results for the use multi-agent reasoning in a diagnostic context in [29].
Another major area of work has been the the telecommunications networks (diagnostics and management) [20,20,19,18,17].