Modeling and inference for troubleshooting with interventions applied to a heavy truck auxiliary braking system

Computer assisted troubleshooting with external interventions is considered. The work is motivated by the task of repairing an automotive vehicle at lowest possible expected cost. The main contribution is a decision theoretic troubleshooting system that is developed to handle external interventions. In particular, practical issues in modeling for troubleshooting are discussed, the troubleshooting system is described, and a method for the efficient probability computations is developed. The troubleshooting systems consists of two parts; a planner that relies on AO⁎ search and a diagnoser that utilizes Bayesian networks (BN). The work is based on a case study of an auxiliary braking system of a modern truck. Two main challenges in troubleshooting automotive vehicles are the need for disassembling the vehicle during troubleshooting to access parts to repair, and the difficulty to verify that the vehicle is fault free. These facts lead to that probabilities for faults and for future observations must be computed for a system that has been subject to external interventions that cause changes in the dependency structure. The probability computations are further complicated due to the mixture of instantaneous and non-instantaneous dependencies. To compute the probabilities, we develop a method based on an algorithm, updateBN, that updates a static BN to account for the external interventions.