Representing time in distributed intelligent diagnostic systems

Complex, distributed systems play central role in practical applications. Such systems are composed of rather heterogeneous parts, which should be handled in a uniform manner. In previous papers the authors have proposed a simple but general modelling ontology with great expressive power to provide this uniformity through the concepts of services, requirements and diagnostic centers. The present paper builds on the proposed structural model, and addresses the time-related problems present in the model and proposes abstractions to efficiently handle time constraints in the diagnostic system model.