Identifying efficient abductive hypotheses using multi-criteria dominance relation

In this article, results of the automation of an abductive procedure are reported. This work is a continuation of our earlier research, where a general scheme of the procedure has been proposed. Here, a more advanced system developed to generate and evaluate abductive hypotheses is introduced. Abductive hypotheses have been generated by the implementation of the Synthetic Tableau Method. Before the evaluation, the set of hypotheses has undergone several reduction phases. To assess usefulness of abductive hypotheses in the reduced set, several criteria have been employed. The evaluation of efficiency of the hypotheses has been provided by the multi-criteria dominance relation. To comprehend the abductive procedure and the evaluation process more extensively, analyses have been conducted on a number of artificially generated abductive problems.