Patent ID: 8219437

Claim:
A system for constructing plans for operating a production plant to achieve one or more production goals, the system comprising: at least one processor; a diagnosis engine implemented using the at least one processor and operative to: determine a current plant condition based at least partially on a previously executed plan, at least one corresponding observation from the plant, and a plant model of the plant, formulate a heuristic based on at least one diagnostic objective related to identifying resources of the plant causing intermittent or persistent faults, and to update a belief model representing the current state of the plant based at least partially on the previously executed plan, the at least one corresponding observation from the plant, and the plant model; and a planner implemented using the at least one processor and operatively coupled with the diagnosis engine to perform a partial-plan search using the heuristic to construct a plan for execution in the plant that will concurrently achieve at least one production goal and facilitate the at least one diagnostic objective; wherein the diagnosis engine is operative to calculate plan failure probabilities based on action failure probabilities and the current plant condition, to formulate the heuristic based at least partially on the plan failure probabilities, and to provide information gain criterion to the planner for one or more possible plans based at least partially on the current plant condition and the plant model; and wherein the planner uses the information gain criterion to construct the plan.