Probabilistic model-based diagnosis

Diagnosis, in artificial intelligence, has traditionally utilized heuristic rules which in many domains are difficult to acquire. An alternative approach, model-based diagnosis, utilizes a model of the system and compares its predicted behavior against the actual behavior of the system for diagnosis. This paper presents a novel technique based on probabilistic models. Therefore, it is natural to include uncertainty in the model and in the measurements for diagnosis. This characteristic makes the proposed approach suitable for applications where reliable measurements are unlikely to occur or where a deterministic analytical model is difficult to obtain. The proposed approach can detect single or multiple faults through a vector of probabilities which reflects the degree of belief in the state of all the components of the system. A comparison against GDE, a classical approach for multiple fault diagnosis, is given.