A method of temporal analysis to perform online diagnosis in the context of flexible manufacturing system

The diagnostic step of the error recovery process in an FMS is considered. The approach, called sequence recognition, is based on the idea that time is a major item of information in the diagnosis. The aim is to use an expert system to achieve online diagnosis. Instead of considering time management as a problem, it is used to discriminate the symptoms at the entry of the diagnostic module. The approach allows simultaneous errors to be diagnosed. Furthermore, it gives the possibility of designing the supervision before the implementation of the FMS