Determining the fault status of a component and its readiness, with a distributed automotive application

In systems using only single-component tests, the fault status of a component is ready if a test only supervising the component has been evaluated. However, if plausibility tests that supervise multiple components are used, then a component can be ready before all tests supervising the component have been evaluated. Based on test results, this paper contributes with conditions on when a component is ready. The conditions on readiness are given for both centralized and distributed systems and are here applied to the distributed diagnostic system in an automotive vehicle.