A model-based approach to sequential fault diagnosis - A best student paper award winner at IEEE Autotestcon 2005

Fault diagnosis is crucial for the reduction of test and integration time as well as downtime of complex systems. In this article, we present a model-based approach to derive tests and test sequences for sequential fault diagnosis. This approach offers advantages over methods that are based on test coverage of explicit fault states, represented in matrix form. Functional models are more easily adapted to design changes and constitute a complete information source for test selection on a given abstraction level. We introduce our approach and implementation with a theoretical example. We demonstrate its practical use in three case studies, and for these cases we obtain cost reductions of up to 59% compared to the matrix-based approach