Reutilization of diagnostic cases by adaptation of knowledge models

This paper deals with design of knowledge oriented diagnostic system. Two challenges are addressed. The first one concerns the elicitation of expert practice and the proposition of a methodology for developing four knowledge containers of case based reasoning system. The second one concerns the proposition of a general adaptation phase to reuse case solving diagnostic problems in a different context. In most cases, adaptation methods are application-specific and the challenge in this work is to make a general adaptation method for the field of industrial diagnostics applications. This paper is a contribution to fill this gap in the field of fault diagnostic and repair assistance of equipment. The proposed adaptation algorithm relies on hierarchy descriptors, an implied context model and dependencies between problems and solutions of the source cases. In addition, one can note that the first retrieved case is not necessarily the most adaptable case, and to take into account this report, an adaptation-guided retrieval step based on a similarity measure associated with an adaptation measure is realized on the diagnostic problem. These two measures allow selecting the most adaptable case among the retrieved cases. The two retrieval and adaptation phases are applied on real industrial system called Supervised industrial system of Transfer of pallets (SISTRE).