System-Level Fault Diagnosis with Dynamic Mesh Optimization

The efficient identification of hardware and software faults in parallel and distributed systems still remains a challenge in today's most prolific decentralized environments. System-level fault diagnosis is concerned with the detection of all faulty nodes in a set of hundreds (or even thousands) of interconnected units. This is accomplished by thoroughly examining the collection of outcomes of all tests carried out by the nodes under a particular test model. Such task has non-polynomial complexity and can be posed as a combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper we employ Dynamic Mesh Optimization (DMO) to detect faulty units in diagnosable systems. The proposed method encodes the potential solutions as binary vectors and exploits problem-specific knowledge to cope with infeasible individuals. The empirical analysis confirms that the DMO-based scheme outperforms existing techniques in terms of convergence speed and memory requirements, thus becoming a viable approach for real-time fault diagnosis in large-size systems.