Important Dates

• Submission deadline: June 1, 2002
• Notification of acceptance: December 1, 2002

Aims and Scope

1. the FDI (Fault Detection and Isolation) community, whose foundations are based on engineering disciplines, such as control theory and statistical decision making, and
2. the DX (Diagnosis) community, whose foundations are derived from the fields of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Each community has developed its own terminology, tools, techniques, and approaches. In the past, there has been very little communication between these two communities, but recently, there are a growing number of researchers in both communities, who are trying to understand and incorporate approaches from their parallel research fields to build better and more effective diagnostic systems.

This special issue of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B will highlight these recent exchanges and collaboration that has developed among the two communities. This has resulted in significant moves to achieve a consensus on a common DX/FDI terminology, and to identify the similarities and the complementary features in the problem definitions and problem solutions developed by the two communities. The goal is to contribute toward a unifying framework, which will enable researchers and practitioners to take advantage of the synergy in the complementary techniques employed by the two communities.

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit high quality articles that cover the spectrum of FDI and DX approaches, and suggest and employ bridges between the parallel methodologies. Papers will be selected based on their innovation in developing novel approaches that demonstrate effective results, and provide solutions that go beyond the traditional techniques developed within each community. Each paper will be thoroughly reviewed by at least three independent reviewers, and the guest editors will use these reviews to select the best 5-6 papers for publication. The final decisions on publication, and the publication date will be communicated to the authors by the editor-in-chief of the transactions.

Scientific Issues and Topics

• Classification of diagnostic problems and diagnostic approaches that span the FDI and DX communities
• Tutorial papers that cover the state of the art and provide a comparative analysis of FDI and DX approaches
• Theoretical comparisons of FDI and DX approaches
• Empirical studies using nontrivial examples to compare the effectiveness and shortcomings of a set of DX and FDI approaches
• Development of novel problem solving methodologies that combine FDI and DX techniques
• Novel methodologies and applications that cannot be classified as standard DX or FDI techniques.

Interesting links to related Groups and Events

Several groups are currently working on the above and related topics:

The BRIDGE group, funded by the Monet Network in the European community ( http://monet.aber.ac.uk/). See the BRIDGE workshop conducted at via Lattea, Italy in conjunction with the 12th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis on March 5-6, 2001 (http://www.di.unito.it/~dx01 under "Bridge Workshop").

The French IMALAIA group, supported by CNRS ( http://www.univ-lille1.fr/s3/ under "Projets en cours", "Projet 1")

The European DAMADICS group (http://www.eng.hull.ac.uk/research/control/act/damadics1.htm)

There have been a number of papers submitted to the IFAC Safeprocess symposia and the International Workshop on principles of Diagnosis that have discussed these issues.

Submissions

Please submit four copies of the paper, complete with illustrations to:

Prof. Gautam Biswas

Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Box 1679 Station B

Vanderbilt University

Nashville, TN 37235.

biswas@vuse.vanderbilt.edu

Guest Editors