Method for fault diagnosis by assessment of confidence measure
First Claim
1. A method for diagnosing the failure condition during operation and maintenance of a system having a plurality of test points, comprising the steps of:
- (a) performing a sequence of each of a plurality of individual tests upon the system to evoke a like sequence of measured responses at a designated configuration of test points;
(b) determining a persistence factor T for a sequential measured set of a plurality N of at least one selected test response;
(c) converting the T factor to a bipolar confidence measure CM then established for that set of sequential test responses actually measured;
(d) determining at least one failure mode based upon a preselected combination of a plurality of confidence measures of sequential ones of all of the selected test responses, as specified by a predetermined corroboration-failure mode operator line; and
(e) corroborating the determined failure mode by a numerical combination of comparisons to other data obtained from the system, prior to reporting the existence of that mode for the system.
3 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
A method for enabling a diagnostic system to assess, within time constraints, the health of the host system during operation, and to detect and isolate system faults during maintenance, with reduced potential for false alarms due to intermittent real faults and system noise, and for apparent misdiagnosis of the host system health, by use of a Diagnostics by Confidence Measure Assessment (DCMA) process in which a confidence measure is provided for each system test failure assessment, resulting from both the use of specialized persistence processing on many test results from a single source and the use of specialized corroboration processing on many test results from different sources.
131 Citations
14 Claims
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1. A method for diagnosing the failure condition during operation and maintenance of a system having a plurality of test points, comprising the steps of:
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(a) performing a sequence of each of a plurality of individual tests upon the system to evoke a like sequence of measured responses at a designated configuration of test points; (b) determining a persistence factor T for a sequential measured set of a plurality N of at least one selected test response; (c) converting the T factor to a bipolar confidence measure CM then established for that set of sequential test responses actually measured; (d) determining at least one failure mode based upon a preselected combination of a plurality of confidence measures of sequential ones of all of the selected test responses, as specified by a predetermined corroboration-failure mode operator line; and (e) corroborating the determined failure mode by a numerical combination of comparisons to other data obtained from the system, prior to reporting the existence of that mode for the system. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)
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Specification