Faults Discovery Using Mined Data

Fault discovery in the complex systems consist of model based reasoning, fault tree analysis, rule based inference methods, and other approaches. Model based reasoning builds models for the systems either by mathematic formulations or by results of experiments. Fault Tree Analysis shows the possible causes of a system malfunction by enumerating the suspect components and their respective failure modes that may have induced the problem. The rule based inference build the model based on the expert knowledge. Those models and methods have one thing in common; they have presumed some prior-conditions. Complex systems often use fault trees to analyze the faults. Fault diagnosis, when an error occurs, is performed by engineers and analysts performing extensive examination of all data gathered during the mission. International Space Station (ISS) control center operates on the data feedback from the system and decisions are made based on threshold values by using fault trees. Since those decision-making tasks are safety critical and must be done promptly, the engineers who manually analyze the data are facing the challenge of time limit. To automate this process, this paper presents an approach that uses decision trees to discover faults from data in real-time and capture the contents of fault trees as the initial state of the trees.