| Abstract: | In the present paper we present results (both theoretical and experimental) concerning architectures integrating CBR and Model-Based Reasoning (MBR) in the context of diagnostic problem solving. We first show that both an MBR approach to diagnosis and a CBR one may suffer from computational intractability, and therefore a careful combination of the two approaches may be useful to reduce the computational cost in the average case. A main contribution of the paper concerns the fact that we analyze the different facets that may influence the whole performance of a multi-modal reasoning system, namely computational complexity, system competence in problem solving and the quality of the sets of produced solutions. We show that an opportunistic and flexible architecture able to estimate the right cooperation among modalities can exhibit a satisfactory behavior with respect to every performance aspect. An analysis of different ways of integrating CBR is performed both at the experimental and at the analytical level. On the analytical side, a cost model and a competence model able to analyze a multi-modal architecture through the analysis of its individual components are introduced and discussed. On the experimental side, a very detailed set of experiments has been carried out, showing that a flexible and opportunistic integration can provide significant advantages in the use of a multi-modal architecture. |
