Elicitation Aspects on Fault Diagnosis of Multifunctional Coductive Flow Systems

Abstract

Fault diagnosis in industry often relies on human experts knowledge; however, the knowledge is mostly incomplete, due to the imprecise information available on target system's faulty behaviour. The paper shortly presents what kind of knowledge the human diagnostician deals with and the way he or she actually acts to manage the incomplete knowledge, aiming to stress how a computational model have to be built. An elicitation path is outlined for the normal and the faulty behaviour of multifunctional conductive flow systems, based on means-end models for the normal behaviour description, and based on generic flow anomalies for the faulty behaviour description for the three orthogonal aspects of flow conduction processes. The generic faulty model resulted, is then presented in an entity-relationship form, useful for the knowledge acquisition on the target system' faulty behaviour (e.g. through a FMEA technique). The paper argues the connectionst approach for the fault diagnosis, exploiting the excitatory/inhibitory relations between entities in a multifunctional conductive flow target system.