Patent ID: 7113988

Claim:
A method for diagnosis of a system made up of a plurality of interlinked modules, comprising: receiving an alarm from the system indicative of a fault in one of the modules; responsive to the alarm, constructing a causal network associating the fault with malfunctions in one or more of the modules that may have led to the fault and relating a conditional probability of the fault to respective probabilities of the malfunctions; based on the alarm and the causal network, updating at least one of the probabilities of the malfunctions; and proposing a diagnosis of the alarm responsive to the updated probabilities, wherein receiving the alarm comprises gathering event reports from the plurality of the modules in the system, and extracting the alarm from the event reports, and wherein extracting the alarm comprises extracting a sequence of alarms occurring at mutually proximal times, including the alarm indicative of the fault in the one of the modules, and wherein updating the at least one of the probabilities comprises processing the sequence of the alarms so as to update the probabilities.