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Grouping failures to infer common causes

  • US 7,529,974 B2
  • Filed: 11/30/2006
  • Issued: 05/05/2009
  • Est. Priority Date: 11/30/2006
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. A computer-executable method, comprising:

  • in a system of interrelated components, monitoring numerous components over time to detect a failure status of each of the numerous components with respect to intervals of the time;

    for each interval of the time, receiving a failure indication for each component that is in failure during that interval;

    forming one or more groups of the received failure indications, each group inferring a cause of failure common to the group;

    arranging the received failure indications into a first matrix representing components versus time, the first matrix indicating the time intervals during which each component is in failure;

    arranging the inferred causes of failure into a second matrix representing inferred causes of failure versus time;

    correlating the components in the first matrix to the inferred causes of failure in the second matrix via a 3-dimensional intermediate matrix representing time slices, each time slice containing probability-based hypothetical groupings of the failure indications received at the time of the time slice and corresponding inferred causes of failure; and

    ranking candidate values for each time slice to distinguish more probable hypothetical groupings of the failure indications from less probable hypothesized groupings of the failure indications.

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