Abstract
In this article, some primitive dimensions of the multidimensional space currently used to classify diagnosis strategies are extracted from the literature. A protocol analysis method is proposed to identify them. An application of the method to a troubleshooting task is presented to illustrate the relevance of the method to the design of a computer tool able to cooperate with the human diagnostician during the progress of diagnosis. In this specific case (remote troubleshooting in a telephone company), widespread tree-based search algorithms (e.g., half-split algorithm) are compared to human strategies. The data analysis shows that the incompatibility between the former and the latter is mainly due to successfully scanning ad hoc hypotheses than to schema-based strategies.
