Title:An Ontology of Faults - Articulation and Organization -
Authors:Yoshinobu Kitamura and Riichiro Mizoguchi
Reference:J. of JSAI, Vol.14, No.5, to appear, 1999 (in Japanese)
Abstract: Although a lot of model-based diagnostic systems have been developed, the conceptual meaning of "causes of faults" detected by them has not been discussed clearly. We believe there are two meanings of causes of faults, that is, the cognitive causes and the physical causes. The former specify locations of faults (i.e., component name) as results of cognitive interpretation based on means-ends relations among functions of hierarchical view of functional architecture. The later represent the states that physically cause the symptoms together with physical causal chains among them. In this article, we define such concepts about faults, aiming at establishing an ontology of faults. A set of classes of faults defined in the ontology allows us to specify the limited scope of detectable faults of conventional diagnostic systems.