Locating Faults in Tree-Structured Networks

An important problem in fault diagnosis is how to locate faulty components by analysing performance measurements from those components. In this paper, we present an algorithm that uses the informationtheoretic Minimum Message Length (MML) principle to locate faults in tree-structured networks. Treestructured networks are an important application for fault diagnosis due to their use as distribution networks in telecommunication and power industries. The main advantage of using a MML approach is that we can model both the complexity of an explanation for a set of measurements, as well as the accuracy of the explanation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through an empirical evaluation on a range of simulated data.