Development of Self-Maintenance Photocopiers

The traditional reliability design methods are imperfect because the designed systems aim at fewer faults, but once a fault happens, the systems might hard fail. Regarding the repair-executing capability, control-type repair strategy was followed. However, the prototype revealed the following problems when its reasoning system was used with a commercial product as embedded software: (1) poor performance of the reasoning system, (2) system size that was too large, (3) low adaptability to environmental changes, and (4) roughness of qualitative repair operations. To solve these problems, we proposed new reasoning method based on virtual cases and fuzzy qualitative values.