Diagnosis for uncertain, dynamic and hybrid domains using Bayesian networks and arithmetic circuits

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t System failures, for example in electrical power systems, can have catastrophic impact on human life and high-cost missions. Due to an electrical fire in Swissair flight 111 on September 2, 1998, all 229 passengers and crew on board sadly lost their lives. A battery failure most likely took place on the Mars Global Surveyor, which unfortunately last communicated with Earth and thus ended its mission on November 2, 2006. Fault diagnosis techniques that seek to hinder similar accidents in the future are being developed in this article. We present comprehensive fault diagnosis methods for dynamic and hybrid domains with uncertainty, and validate them using electrical power system data. Our approach relies on the use of Bayesian networks, which model the electrical power system, compiled to arithmetic circuits. We handle in an integrated way varying fault dynamics (both persistent and intermittent faults), fault progression (both abrupt and drift faults), and fault behavior cardinality (both discrete and continuous behaviors). Our work has resulted in a software system for fault diagnosis, ProDiagnose, that has been the top performer in three of the four international diagnostics competitions in which it participated. In this paper we comprehensively present our methods as well as novel and extensive experimental results on data from a NASA electrical power system.