Aiding the operator during novel fault diagnosis

The design and philosophy are presented for an intelligent aid for a hyman operator who must diagnose a novel fault in a physical system. A novel fault is defined as one that the operator has not experienced in either real system operation or training. When the operator must diagnose a novel fault, deep reasoning about the behavior of the system components is required. To aid the human operator in this situation, four aiding approaches which provide useful information are proposed. The aiding information is generated by a qualitative, component-level model of the physical system. Both the aid and the human are able to reason causally about the system in a cooperative search for a diagnosis. The aiding features were designed to help the hyman's use of his/her mental model in predicting the normal system behavior, integrating the observations into the actual system behavior, or finding discrepancies between the two. The aid can also have direct access to the operator's hypotheses and run a hypothetical system model. The different aiding approaches will be evaluated by a series of experiments.