Taxonomy and Overview of Distributed Malfunction Diagnosis in Networks of Intelligent Nodes

Started 50 years ago, the field of (system-level) malfunction diagnosis has expanded immensely and continues to be a very active subfield in both parallel processing and dependable computing research communities, with much of the new research coming from China and Taiwan in recent years. This paper represents an attempt to organize the field of research in distributed malfunction diagnosis via an overarching, descriptive, and consistent taxonomy that not only covers all of the past work, but also foretells of possible future research to fill gaps left by current results and areas that are just beyond the domains already investigated. The paper is accessible to computer science and engineering specialists who are new to the field, because it uses analogies to unveil the nature of the research problems and pertinent challenges.