Possibility theory in “Fault mode effect analyses”. Asatellite fault diagnosis application

摘要

Matra Marconi Space (MMS) has been developing spacecraftdiagnostic support systems for eight years. Keeping in mind theoperational constraints of scale and efficiency that guided the designof the first systems, the reasoning paradigms are now refined, in orderto improve the solutions. The FMECA, Fault Mode Effects and CriticalityAnalyses, form a very important category of knowledge compiled duringthe design phase of a satellite, and used also for diagnosis activities.This paper proposes their extension, allowing a finer representation ofthe available knowledge, at approximately the same cost, through theintroduction of an appropriate representation of uncertainty andincompleteness based on possibility theory. Efficient discriminizationtechniques exploiting uncertain observations are introduced, and anexample illustrates the mechanisms involved in this approach