Enhanced methodologies for process diagnosis and abnormal situation management have been developed for the last two decades. However, there is no single method that always shows better performance over all kinds of diagnostic problems. In this paper, a framework of message-passing, cooperative, intelligent diagnostic agents is presented for improved on-line fault diagnosis through cooperative problem solving of different expertise. A group of diagnostic agents in charge of different process functional perform local diagnoses in parallel; exchange related information with other diagnostic agents; and cooperatively solve the global diagnostic problem of the whole process plant or business units just like human experts would do. For their better understanding, sharing and exchanging of process knowledge and information, we also suggest a way of remodeling processes and protocols, taking into account semantic abstracts of process information and data. The benefits of the suggested multi-agents-based approach are demonstrated by the implementations for solving the diagnostic problems of various chemical processes.