Failure Diagnosis of Complex Systems

Abstract

Failure diagnosis is the process of identifying the causes of impairment in a system's function based on observable symptoms, i.e., determining which fault led to an observed failure. Since multiple faults can often lead to very similar symptoms, failure diagnosis is often the first line of defense when things go wrong -a prerequisite before any corrective actions can be undertaken. The results of diagnosis also provide data about a system's operational fault profile for use in offline resilience evaluation. While diagnosis has historically been a largely manual process requiring significant human input, techniques to automate as much of the process as possible have significantly grown in importance in many industries including telecommunications, internet services, automotive systems, and aerospace. This chapter presents a survey of automated failure diagnosis techniques including both model-based and model-free approaches. Industrial applications of these techniques in the above domains are presented, and finally, future trends and open challenges in the field are discussed.

Survey on Models and Techniques for Root-Cause Analysis

“…In this survey, we follow the terminology proposed in [2]: Event is an exceptional condition occurring in the operation of a system. Faults/problems/root causes are events that can cause other events but are not themselves caused by other events.…”

“…While one may be tempted to believe that this may only affect some limited number of markets, all indicators show a much more aggressive trend for companies in all industries to transform businesses through software, exploring much further market adjacencies. 54% of CEOs have entered a new sector or sub-sector, or considered it, in the past three years 2 . Also from the same source by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 55% of entertainment and media CEOs, 52% of communications CEOs, 48% of power and utilities CEOs and 47% of banking and capital markets CEOs say a significant competitor from the technology sector is emerging or will emerge.…”

“…Although there is a vast literature on RCA, we will restrict to techniques that can be applied to IT systems. Our survey builds on the shoulders of previous contributions from other general surveys like [2]. For surveys on specific areas, the reader may refer to [3], [4] for computer networks, [5], [6] for software, [7], [8] for industrial systems, [9] for smart buildings, [10] for buildings, [11] for machinery, [12] for swarm systems, [13], [14] for automatic control systems, [15], [16] for automotive systems and [17] for aerospace systems.…”

An Organizing System to Perform and Enable Verification and Diagnosis Activities

“…A variety of failure diagnosis techniques drawing from diverse areas of computing and mathematics such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, stochastic modelling, Bayesian inference, rule-based inference, information theory, and graph theory have been studied in the literature [10]. In the model-based diagnosis, often referred as diagnosis from first principles, one is given a description of a system, to-gether with an observation of the system's behavior which conflicts with the way the system is meant to behave.…”

Model driven root cause analysis and reliability enhancement for large distributed computing systems

“…When compared to other diagnostic techniques [22], the Bayesian networks are distinguished as a solution for problems of an unacceptable quantity of false alarms. These alarms can be set off by a monitoring system with a threshold approach.…”