Advanced Reasoning Group History

This group changed its name as it evolved. It started, back in the 1980s, when the robotics research group realised that software models could be very useful for analysing errors and diagnosing failures. The robotics group was trying to build robot control software that could automatically diagnose errors and find ways of recovering from them. This was in the context of automated assembly: programming robots to assemble industrial components from a collection of small parts. Rule-based approaches were very popular then (and commercially lucrative) and were used to capture rules of human expertise (often known as Expert Systems). We found that too much knowledge had to be programmed into the system rather than being generated by the system itself. But if the system maintained a model of the component being assembled then it could compare the state of the component with the state of the ideal as seen in the model. This seemed very promising and there were several people in the department interested in model-building so the group formed and took the name, the Model Based Systems group.

Following much work on modelling physical objects, we found that electrical circuits could be modelled with the same techniques we had developed and, rather surprisingly, were easier to model than mechanical devices. The group became well known internationally and its most notable early successes were in diagnostic and failure analysis techniques for circuit design in the automotive industry. The standard industry process, known as Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) was automated by our technique, giving a twenty-fold speedup. Other work on model-based reasoning includes investigations into generic diagnostic and monitoring problems in continuous process plant (Corus Group, formerly British Steel). Prof Chris Price, produced an authoritative practitioner monograph, encapsulating the state-of-the-art in software based diagnostic techniques – Computer based diagnostic systems. Springer-Verlag, 1999.

At that time, the key technology of the group was Qualitative Reasoning (QR), which uses qualitative variables like 'high', 'medium' or 'low' instead of traditional quantitative measures. Group members became heavily involved in the international research community in QR, including programme chairs and committee members for the regular workshops and conferences, particularly the international workshops on Principles of Diagnosis, DX, and on Qualitative Reasoning QR, and the workshops on Applications of Qualitative Reasoning Systems, and Model-based systems and Qualitative Reasoning, at the ECAI conferences.

The scope of our work in QR extended to cover specific automotive problems, functional modelling of components, and the modelling of electronic control units. Within the research community, there were interests in fuzzy reasoning and a combination of fuzzy methods with QR. This strand of research has been extended substantially with Prof Qiang Shen, who pioneered the work on integrating approximate inference and model-based reasoning. Since 2004, the group name changed to the Advanced Reasoning Group (ARG) to reflect the coverage of qualitative and approximative reasoning, methods of knowledge representation, and model-based problem solving.