Patent ID: 7313573

Claim:
A method to diagnose equipment failures using an integrated approach of case-based reasoning and reliability analysis, comprising the steps of: collecting a statistical reliability data for each of a plurality of given equipments and for each of the hardware components of said equipment, said collecting including calculating a statistical average time between two successive failures of the equipment, calculating a statistical average time between successive two failures for each of said hardware components, calculating a statistical average time to repair failures of the equipment and calculating a statistical average time to repair failures of each of its hardware components; constructing a case base database for each of the equipment, wherein each case based database record comprises at least four fields, including a failed equipment identifier field, a failed component identifier field, a failure description text field, and a solution record field; receiving an equipment problem description from a user, said description including a problem equipment identifier and a problem description text; generating for each of said hardware components a conditional statistical probability of said component having a failed state given that the equipment identified by the user-input problem equipment identifier has a failed state, based on said collected statistical reliability data; matching the problem description test input by the user to the failure description text field of the case base database records to calculate a case-based probability for each of said hardware components associated with said failed state; generating a list of component troubleshooting recommendations based on said generated conditional statistical probabilities and said calculated case base probabilities; and displaying said list of generated troubleshooting recommendations.