A fault detection and isolation method for automotive engines

This paper presents an approach to the development of diagnostic systems for online diagnosis of faults in automobile engines. The proposed technique consists of describing the plant devices, the sensors, the actuators and diagnostic tests as discrete-event systems. A formal composition rule of these models is given and an inference procedure for the identification and isolation of the faults is discussed. Temporal information is also considered to speed up the fault isolation procedure and, in some cases, to uniquely identify faults with the same static fault signature.