Patent ID: 8073587

Claim:
A diagnostic method for locating a failure in a complex system, the method comprising: detecting operating information using a detector device; verifying a performance of the system based on the operating information; determining an operating status of the system to be one of â€œoperational,â€ â€œnon-operationalâ€ and â€œdegradedâ€ based on the operating information; comparing the operating information with predetermined data when the operation status is one of â€œoperational,â€ â€œnon-operationalâ€ and â€œdegraded;â€ and generating at least one hypothesis as to a location of the failure of the system, wherein the generating includes: in a first step, triggering a diagnostic algorithm by detecting a failure occurrence within the operating information and generating corresponding failure messages or recovering failure messages generated directly by the system; in a second step, filtering the failure messages so as to eliminate erroneous failure messages by defining logical and dynamic relationships of a dynamic failure tree (DFT) that must be satisfied by the failure message; in a third step, capturing information inherent to the failure messages not eliminated in the second step; in a fourth step, taking the failure message from a time window T, sorting the captured information so as to obtain results, and comparing the results with predetermined data using the DFT so as to identify and locate a failure; and in a fifth step, generating a diagnosis identifying and locating the failure.