A Multi-agent System for Complex Vehicle Fault Diagnostics and Health Monitoring

This paper presents a multi-agent system(MAS_VFD&HM) developed for complex vehicle fault diagnosis and health monitoring. The MAS_VFD&HM consists of signal diagnostic agents, special case agents, and a vehicle diagnostic/monitoring agent. A signal agent is responsible for the fault diagnosis or monitoring of one particular signal using either a single signal or multiple signals depending on the complexity of signal faults. Special case agents are those trained to detect specific component faults. All these agents are autonomous and report their results to the Vehicle System Agent. A computational framework is presented for agent learning and agent operation. The proposed MAS_VFD&HM is scalable, versatile, and has the capability of dealing complex problems such as multiple faults in a vehicle system. Although our focus was on the automotive diagnostics, the proposed MAS_VFD&HM is applicable to complex engineering diagnostic problems beyond vehicles.