Improving test strategies and fault isolation with expert systems

The use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) expert systems in integrated diagnostics (ID) for military applications is examined. The most important differentiating characteristics of expert systems are their modeling methods, and their architecture. The modeling method drastically affects the time required to build a model, and the architecture must be open enough to integrate with the many tools used in engineering, deployment, and maintenance of the supported equipment throughout its life cycle. The Fault Modeling method is presented which has been field-proven over the past decade as flexible enough to meet the challenges of different lifecycle tasks.