Structural Algorithms in Rodon : with a prototype implementation in Java

As machines are increasingly used to fulfill even more needs of mankind, the dependence upon those machines increase. To prevent catastrophic failure and to facilitate maintenance a diagnostic system can be used. A diagnostic system supervises the system and can alarm the operator when a fault has occurred, and possibly determine what the cause may be. One architecture of a diagnostic system is a number of tests run by an on-board computer checking certain combinations of sensor values and control signals chosen in advance. To design these tests is a difficult task, which leads to the desire to automate the test construction. A part of this task can be performed using structural methods. In this thesis model based diagnosis is considered. This means that a formal mathematical model is used. The models typically consist of a number of equations describing the behavior of the system. In structural methods it is only considered if a variable exists in an equation or not. The goal of this master thesis project has been to apply structural methods to RODON models. RODON is a software diagnostics tool brought to market by Sörman Information & Media, which can perform various diagnostic-related tasks based on a single model. This model is defined in an object oriented fashion using a Modelica-like language called Rodelica. A prototype implementation of a structural algorithm plug-in has been developed and integrated into RODON. An additional part of the project has been to investigate further possible uses of structural algorithms in RODON, apart from diagnostic test construction. This has been performed as a series of interviews with Sörman and university employees. The work performed in this thesis has shown that it is possible to apply structural methods to RODON models. It has also shown that even a prototype implementation can handle quite large systems. Some problems have been found as well, most notably in extracting a structural model from a RODON model. A consequence is that the developed structural plug-in only works for a subset of RODON models. It might be possible to deal with these problems if more time would be spent on the task. Finally, the interview survey revealed other possible uses of structural methods in RODON, including optimal sensor placement analysis and isolability and detectability analysis