Complex machines can fail in complex ways. Often the nature of the fault can be determined only through the interpretation of machine behavior over time. This book presents a novel approach to the representation and recognition of temporally distributed symptoms. Existing diagnostic expert systems usually operate under a set of simplifying assumptions that limit their applicability. A common assumption is that the device to be diagnosed has a static behavior, with the relation between inputs and outputs constant over time. In most realistic application domains this assumption is violated and...