Diagnosis of Technical Systems

Increasing complexity of technical systems requires a precise fault localization in order to reduce maintenance costs and system downtimes. Model-based diagnosis has been presented as a method to derive root causes for observed symptoms, utilizing a description of the system to be diagnosed. Practical applications of model-based diagnosis, however, are often prevented by the initial modeling task and computational complexity associated with diagnosis. In the proposed thesis, we investigate techniques addressing these issues. In particular, we utilize a mapping function which converts fault information available in practice into propositional horn logic sentences to be used in abductive model-based diagnosis. Further, we plan on devising algorithms which allow an efficient computation of explanations given the obtained models.