BLANK NOT FlLMED Nag - 19824 DIAGNOSTICS IN THE EXTENDABLE INTEGRATED SUPPORT ENVIRONMENT ( EISE )

EISE is an Air Force developed real-time computer network consisting of conercially available hardware and software components to support systems level integration, modifications and enhancements to weapons systems. The EISE approach offers substantial potential savings by eliminating unique support environments in favor of sharing common modules for the support of operational weapon systems. An expert system is being developed that will help support diagnosing faults in this network. This is a multi-level, multi-expert diagnostic system which uses experiential knowledge relating symptoms to faults and also reasons from structural and functional models of the underlying physical model when experiential reasoning is inadequate. The individual expert systems are orchestrated by a supervisory reasoning controller, a meta-level reasoner which plans the sequence of reasoning steps to solve the given specific problem. The overall system, termed the Diagnostic Executive, accesses systems level performance checks and error reports, and issues remote test procedures to formulate and confirm fault hypotheses.