We present in this article a case study of the probabilistic approach to model-based diagnosis. Here, the diagnosed system is a real-world electrical power system, namely the Advanced Diagnostic and Prognostic Testbed (ADAPT) located at the NASA Ames Research Center. Our probabilistic approach is formally well-founded, and based on Bayesian networks and arithmetic circuits. We pay special attention to meeting two of the main challenges — model development and real-time reasoning — often associated with real-world application of model-based diagnosis technologies. To address the challenge of model development, we develop a systematic approach to representing electrical power systems as Bayesian networks, supported by an easy-touse specication language. To address the real-time reasoning challenge, we compile Bayesian networks into arithmetic circuits. Arithmetic circuit evaluation supports real-time diagnosis by being predictable and fast. In experiments with the ADAPT Bayesian network, which contains 503 discrete nodes and 579 edges and produces accurate results, the time taken to compute the most probable explanation using arithmetic circuits has a mean of 0.2625 milliseconds and a standard deviation of 0.2028 milliseconds. In comparative experiments, we found that while the variable elimination and join tree propagation algorithms also perform very well in the ADAPT setting, arithmetic circuit evaluation was an order of magnitude or more faster.

Reference:

O. J. Mengshoel, M. Chavira, K. Cascio, S. Poll, A. Darwiche, and S. Uckun. "Probabilistic Model-Based Diagnosis: An Electrical Power System Case Study”. Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A, 2009.