Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 5, numbers 3 and 4, 2012 // View article
Authors:
Amer Dheeadn
Keywords: fault detection and diagnosis; alarm annunciation; fault controlling; prognosis; sensory measurements filtration and validation
Abstract:
The operational safety of critical systems, such as nuclear power plants, aircraft and chemical processes, is typically maintained by the delivery of three real-time safety tasks: fault detection and diagnosis, alarm annunciation and fault controlling. Although current on-line safety monitors play this role to some extent, the problem of consistent and timely task performance is largely unresolved. An aspect of the problem is attributed to the type of monitoring knowledge that informs the real-time reasoning; should it be derived, for example, from off-line design models or the operational context of the monitored system? Another aspect is attributed to whether the monolithic or distributed monitor is able to scale up and cope with the complicated and distributed nature of modern critical systems. To address the problem, this paper develops a distributed on-line safety monitor from monitoring knowledge derived from a safety assessment model of the monitored system and a multi-agent system. Agents are deployed hierarchically according to the architecture of the monitored system and they are provided with portions of the knowledge to reason locally over the conditions of the monitored components and collaborate globally to reason over the overseen behaviour of the entire system. The paper also tests the monitor via an application to an aircraft fuel system and evaluates the approach and results by contrasting them with those of earlier work.
Pages: 95 to 113
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2012. Used with permission.
Publication date: December 31, 2012
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2652