Patent ID: 7426502

Claim:
A health assessor for assessing health of a target element within a multi-element system, comprising: a plurality of sensors, each being operatively coupled to the target element to produce a measure of the target element; a plurality of measure collectors, each collecting a measure from one of the sensors, wherein each of the collectors also stores the measure as historical measure; a plurality of evaluators, each evaluating at least a subset of all the measures collected by the measure collectors in accordance with a pre-configured evaluation definition for the respective evaluator to provide an assessment; a probabilistic reasoning network coupled to the evaluators to receive the assessment from each of the evaluators and to analyze the assessments in accordance with a pre-configured reasoning definition so as to provide an overall probabilistic health assessment of the target element, the probabilistic reasoning network to analyze the assessments from the evaluators according to information indicating reliabilities of the respective evaluators.