Distributed Diagnosis of Networked Embedded Systems
J. Kurien, X. Koutsoukos, and F. Zhao
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX-2002),
pp. 179-188, Semmering, Austria, May 2-4, 2002.
Abstract -- Networked embedded systems are composed of a large number of
physically distributed nodes that interact with the physical world via
a set of sensors and actuators, have their own computational
capabilities, and communicate with each other via a wired or wireless
network. Monitoring and diagnosis for such systems must address
several challenges caused by the distribution of resources,
communication limitations, and node and link failures. This paper
presents a distributed diagnosis framework that exploits the topology
of a physical system to be diagnosed to limit inter-diagnoser
communication and compute diagnoses in an anytime and any information
manner, making it robust to communication and processor failures. The
framework adopts the consistency-based diagnosis formalism and
develops a distributed constraint satisfaction realization of the
diagnosis algorithm. Each local diagnoser first computes locally
consistent diagnoses, taking into account local sensing information
only. The local diagnosis sets are reduced to globally consistent
diagnoses through pairwise communications between local diagnosers.
The algorithm has been successfully demonstrated for the diagnosis of
paper path faults for the Xerox DC265 printer.
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