Patent ID: 7958062

Claim:
A method of detecting a fault in a dynamic aircraft system comprising: a. recording event codes that occur during operation of a dynamic aircraft system during flights of an aircraft; b. generating a database by storing the event codes as a stream of event code sequences represented by an m×n matrix having entries in the form of c(i, j), where m is the number of different event codes over a total number of flights, n is a total number of flights, and c(i, j) represents a number of counts or occurrences of an i th event code during a j th flight; c. normalizing the occurrences of each i th event per flight by a total number of occurrences per flight to obtain a frequency of occurrence per flight that defines input vectors, each input vector represented by [f(i, j) . . . f(m,j)]; d. suppressing nuisance event codes by limiting the maximum frequency of each occurrence per flight to substantially twice the standard deviation of all occurrences per flight; e. clustering the frequency of occurrence per flight of the input vector using a self-organizing map; f. setting a quantization error threshold to be substantially equal to about three times the standard deviation of the differences between a prototype vector and all input vectors; and g. detecting an error in the dynamic system when an input vector differs from the prototype by at least the amount of the quantization error.