Modeling Failure Priors and Persistence in Model-Based Diagnosis

Probabilistic model-based diagnosis computes the posterior probabilities of failure of components from the prior probabilities of component failure and observations of system behavior. One problem with this method is that such priors are almost never directly available. One of the reasons is that th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Author Sampath Srinivas
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 20.02.2013
Subjects
Component reliability
Conditional probability
Diagnosis
Failure
Modelling
MTBF
Probabilistic models
Statistical analysis
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Summary:Probabilistic model-based diagnosis computes the posterior probabilities of failure of components from the prior probabilities of component failure and observations of system behavior. One problem with this method is that such priors are almost never directly available. One of the reasons is that the prior probability estimates include an implicit notion of a time interval over which they are specified -- for example, if the probability of failure of a component is 0.05, is this over the period of a day or is this over a week? A second problem facing probabilistic model-based diagnosis is the modeling of persistence. Say we have an observation about a system at time t_1 and then another observation at a later time t_2. To compute posterior probabilities that take into account both the observations, we need some model of how the state of the system changes from time t_1 to t_2. In this paper, we address these problems using techniques from Reliability theory. We show how to compute the failure prior of a component from an empirical measure of its reliability -- the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF). We also develop a scheme to model persistence when handling multiple time tagged observations.
ISSN:2331-8422