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All research Conference paper · 2008 · IAAI-08

Diagnosing Faults in Electrical Power Systems of Spacecraft and Aircraft

Ole J. Mengshoel · Adnan Darwiche · Keith Cascio · Mark Chavira · Scott Poll · Serdar Uckun

NASA-funded work that ran the method on ADAPT, the electrical power system testbed at NASA Ames. A model of more than 400 nodes, compiled once, returned diagnoses in under a millisecond on average.

What it showed

ADAPT is a working electrical power system at NASA Ames, built to be representative of the power systems in aircraft and spacecraft, with generation, storage and distribution. The paper set out to diagnose it with probabilistic reasoning and met two problems that come up in every real diagnostic application, how to build the model and how to reason within a hard real-time budget.

For the first, the team wrote a specification language that generates the Bayesian network of a power system from a description of its components. For the second, the network was compiled once into an arithmetic circuit, a small and predictable structure that an avionics computer can evaluate. The circuit answered diagnostic queries on real ADAPT data in under a millisecond on average, on a model of more than 400 nodes covering more than 100 components.

Why it matters

This is the problem Manifest addresses, two decades earlier and in its first form. The specification language is the ancestor of automated model production. The compiled circuit is the reason a diagnosis can run onboard with a known time and memory budget. The work was funded by NASA and published at an AAAI conference.

Scope

ADAPT is a ground testbed, not a flight system. This was a research prototype in 2008, not PiLogic's product. The linked copy is the AAAI proceedings version of record; NASA also hosts a preprint, which lists Ann Patterson-Hine as an author. The proceedings version thanks her for her central role in developing ADAPT.

More research.

JOURNAL · 2008 On probabilistic inference by weighted model counting Overview INDEPENDENT · 2021 Partition Function Estimation: A Quantitative Study Overview JOURNAL · 2010 Probabilistic Model-Based Diagnosis: An Electrical Power System Case Study Overview

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