Patent ID: 7536595

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving information indicative of a fault from a monitor, the monitor one of a plurality of monitors; responsive to the information indicative of the fault, automatically determining a probability of a fault hypothesis, the fault hypothesis one of a plurality of fault hypotheses, the probability determined based upon outputs of all of the plurality of monitors; and responsive to a determination of a most probable fault hypothesis of the plurality of fault hypotheses, automatically initiating a recursively-determined, substantially optimal, multiple-step recovery action to correct the fault, each step of the multiple-step recovery action associated with a cost, the most probable fault hypothesis determined responsive to an automatically modified value, the recursively-determined, substantially optimal, multiple-step recovery action determined based upon historical performance of the multiple-step recovery action; wherein the recursively-determined, substantially optimal, multiple-step recovery action is selected based upon a solution of a partially observable Markov decision process.