Qualitative model based diagnosis of continuous dynamic systems

The paper presents several innovations in the development of techniques for diagnosing continuous dynamic systems based on qualitative models. It argues that, to diagnose such physical systems, a mechanism for modelling and simulating continuous dynamic behaviours, a method for synchronous tracking of the dynamic behaviours, a metric for detecting degradation of the continuous behaviours and for matching predictions with observations must be developed. The paper provides a particular realisation of these techniques, following a proposal for iteratively searching for fault models against possible modelling dimensions. The process of how such a diagnostic system finds faults is demonstrated by a simple example