Diagnosis of continuous valued systems in transient operating regions

The complexity of present day embedded systems (continuous processes controlled by digital processors), and the increased demands on their reliability motivate the need for monitoring and fault isolation capabilities in the embedded processors. This paper develops monitoring, prediction, and fault isolation methods for abrupt faults in complex dynamic systems. The transient behavior in response to those faults is analyzed in a qualitative framework using parsimonious topological system models. Predicted transient effects of hypothesized faults are captured in the form of signatures that specify future faulty behavior as higher order time-derivatives. The dynamic effects of faults are analyzed by a progressive monitoring scheme till transient analysis mechanisms have to be suspended in favor of steady state analysis. This methodology has been successfully applied to monitoring of the secondary sodium cooling loop of a fast breeder reactor.