Patent ID: 7529974

Claim:
A computer-executable method, comprising: in a system of interrelated components, monitoring numerous components over time to detect a failure status of each of the numerous components with respect to intervals of the time; for each interval of the time, receiving a failure indication for each component that is in failure during that interval; forming one or more groups of the received failure indications, each group inferring a cause of failure common to the group; arranging the received failure indications into a first matrix representing components versus time, the first matrix indicating the time intervals during which each component is in failure; arranging the inferred causes of failure into a second matrix representing inferred causes of failure versus time; correlating the components in the first matrix to the inferred causes of failure in the second matrix via a 3-dimensional intermediate matrix representing time slices, each time slice containing probability-based hypothetical groupings of the failure indications received at the time of the time slice and corresponding inferred causes of failure; and ranking candidate values for each time slice to distinguish more probable hypothetical groupings of the failure indications from less probable hypothesized groupings of the failure indications.