Combining qualitative quantitative reasoning - a hybrid approach to failure diagnosis of industrial systems

摘要

This paper presents a hybrid approach to failure diagnosis of industrial systems. The proposed diagnostic system integrates the qualitative discrete event systems diagnostic methodology with quantitative analysis based techniques. The primary motivation for this hybrid approach is to achieve failure diagnosis in systems with limited sensor availability. The proposed scheme has the following key advantages: (i) it integrates a variety of diagnostic technologies in one unified framework; (ii) it combines the relative advantages of the quantitative and the qualitative diagnostic schemes; and (iii) it provides the ability to study the diagnosability properties of the resulting hybrid system using existing theory of diagnosis developed for discrete event systems. The proposed approach is illustrated using the paper feeder system of a digital copier as an example.