Model-based monitoring and diagnosis of systems with software-extended behavior

Abstract

Model-based diagnosis has largely operated on hardware systems. However, in most complex systems today, hardware is augmented with software functions that influence the system’s behavior. In this paper, hardware models are extended to include the behavior of associated embedded software, resulting in more comprehensive diagnoses. Prior work introduced probabilistic, hierarchical, constraint-based automata (PHCA) to allow the uniform and compact encoding of both hardware and software behavior. This paper focuses on PHCA-based monitoring and diagnosis to ensure the robustness of complex systems. We introduce a novel approach that frames diagnosis over a finite time horizon as a soft constraint optimization problem (COP), allowing us to leverage an extensive body of efficient solution methods for COPs. The solutions to the COP correspond to the most likely evolutions of the complex system. We demonstrate our approach on a vision-based rover navigation system, and models of the SPHERES and Earth Observing One spacecraft.