The paper presents objectives and results of a series of case studies in computer support for diagnosis, failure mode and effects analysis, and the creation of repair manuals in the domain of automotive systems. Model-based prediction and diagnosis reflect the requirements of these tasks. More specifically, qualitative models of system components are necessary for both capturing the available k...

Signalling, a complex system is one of the most important infrastructures of railway service. The performance of railway signalling system depends on the functioning of a number of subsystems, such as panel, cable, relay, point and point machine, trackcircuit, signal, back indication, point-drive card, signal-drive card, and level crossing gate. Railway signalling system plays an important role...

A failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) was applied to improve the design of concrete ties in ballasted track for North American heavy haul applications. A literature review was conducted on concrete tie failure modes, failure effects, and failure causes. A survey of railroads and transit authorities in North America provided a ranking of the most critical concrete tie failure modes. The most...

The Fault Mode Effects and Criticality Analyses (FMECA), describe the impact of identified faults. They form an important category of knowledge gathered during the design phase of a satellite, and are used also for diagnosis activities. This paper proposes their extension, allowing a finer representation of the available knowledge, at approximately the same cost, through the introduction of an ...

Technical systems are prevalent in many areas of our society. Nowadays they often include a considerable amount of software. Identification and avoidance of technical risks is of major importance in the development of these softwareintensive technical systems. A powerful analysis technique in the development process for technical systems is the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). This tec...

We present a mechanism based on Chandra and Toueg unreliable failure detectors model. This mechanism can be used as building block for distributed systems running on Internet and requiring a non-blocking agreement between their components. The protocol we propose tolerates both local participants and groups of participants' failures in a large-scale and asynchronous environment prone to failures.

The knowledge about failures needed to solve distributed agreement problems can be expressed in terms of completeness and accuracy properties of failure detectors introduced by Chandra and Toueg. The accuracy properties they have considered restrict the false suspicions that can be made by all the processes in the system. In this paper, we deene \??accurate" failure detectors, whose accuracy pr...

The paper presents a multi-factor decision-making approach for prioritizing failure modes as an alternative to traditional approach of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA). The approach is based on the ‘technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution’ (TOPSIS). The priority ranking is formulated on the basis of six parameters (failure occurrence, non-detection, maintainability...

Traditionally, failure detectors have considered a binary model whereby a given process can be either trusted or suspected. This paper defines a family of failure detectors, called accrual failure detectors, that revisits this interaction model. Accrual failure detectors associate to each process a real value representing a suspicion level. An important advantage of accrual failure detectors ov...

Unreliable failure detectors, proposed by Chandra and Toueg [2], are mechanisms that provide information about process failures. In [2], eight classes of failure detectors were defined, depending on how accurate this information is, and an algorithm implementing a failure detector of one of these classes in a partially synchronous system was presented. This algorithm is based on all-to-all comm...