An intelligent fault diagnoser for distributed processing in telescience applications

Abstract

A system of self maintenance for fault detection and correction in a highly automated system is presented in this thesis. The self maintenance scheme consists of three parts: a watchdog monitor for fault detection, a diagnoser to pinpoint the exact component failure, and a method of repair. The second part of the scheme, the diagnoser, is developed in detail and applied to the teleoperated THAW telescope. The THAW telescope is an Earth-bound prerunner of the Astrometric Telescope Facility (ATF), an approved payload of the forthcoming International Space Station Freedom (SSF). The simulation of the ATF is modified to produce permanent hardware failures. A diagnoser is created using shallow reasoning and a rule base which pinpoints the most likely failure(s) with reasonable success. Implementation of the watchdog monitor and the repair system is left for future work.