Patent ID: 8175846

Claim:
A method for splitting a fault condition based on a relative likelihood of the failure modes, the method comprising: receiving, in a processor, evidence observations of a monitored system from monitors connected in a many-to-many relationship to the failure modes; and in the processor: generating a fault condition comprising states of all failure modes for a reference model of the monitored system based on the evidence observations; computing a relative probability of failure for each failure mode in the fault condition, the relative probability being based on a false alarm probability, a detection probability, and a ratio of prior probabilities of a candidate hypothesis to a null hypothesis of no active failure modes; when there is more than one failure mode in the fault condition, computing a relative probability of each pair of failure modes in the fault condition, the relative probability being based on a false alarm probability, a detection probability, and a ratio of prior probabilities of a candidate hypothesis to a null hypothesis of no active failure modes; ranking the computed relative probabilities of the individual failure modes and the computed relative probabilities of the pairs of failure modes; if the highest ranked failure mode is a pair of failure modes, splitting the fault condition based on the failure modes in the highest ranked pair of failure modes; and if the highest ranked failure mode is an individual failure mode, isolating a failure based on the ranking.