Applying Active Diagnosis to Space Systems by On-Board Control Procedures

The instrumentation of real systems is often designed for control purposes and control inputs are designed to achieve nominal control objectives. Hence, the available measurements may not be sufficient to isolate faults with certainty and diagnoses are ambiguous. Active diagnosis formulates a planning problem to generate a sequence of actions that, applied to the system, enforce diagnosability and allow to iteratively refine ambiguous diagnoses. This paper analyses the requirements for applying active diagnosis to space systems and proposes ActHyDiag as an effective framework to solve this problem. It presents the results of applying ActHyDiag to a real space case study and of implementing the generated plans in the form of On-Board Control Procedures. The case study is a redundant Spacewire Network where up to 6 instruments, monitored and controlled by the on-board software hosted in the Satellite Management Unit, are transferring science data to a mass memory unit through Spacewire routers. Experiments have been conducted on a real physical benchmark developed by Thales Alenia Space and demonstrate the effectiveness of the plans proposed by ActHyDiag.

An Integrated Framework for Diagnosis and Prognosis of Hybrid Systems

Complex systems are naturally hybrid: their dynamic behavior is both continuous and discrete. For these systems, maintenance and repair are an increasing part of the total cost of final product. Efficient diagnosis and prognosis techniques have to be adopted to detect, isolate and anticipate faults. This paper presents an original integrated theoretical framework for diagnosis and prognosis of hybrid systems. The formalism used for hybrid diagnosis is enriched in order to be able to follow the evolution of an aging law for each fault of the system. The paper presents a methodology for interleaving diagnosis and prognosis in a hybrid framework.