Comparison of dynamic Bayesian network approaches for online diagnosis of aircraft system

The online diagnosis for aircraft system has always been a difficult problem. This is due to time evolution of system change, uncertainty of sensor measurements, and real-time requirement of diagnostic inference. To address this problem, two dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) approaches are proposed. One approach prunes the DBN of system, and then uses particle filter (PF) for this pruned DBN (PDBN) to perform online diagnosis. The problem is that estimates from a PF tend to have high variance for small sample sets. Using large sample sets is computationally expensive. The other approach compiles the PDBN into a dynamic arithmetic circuit (DAC) using an offline procedure that is applied only once, and then uses this circuit to provide online diagnosis recursively. This approach leads to the most computational consumption in the offline procedure. The experimental results show that the DAC, compared with the PF for PDBN, not only provides more reliable online diagnosis, but also offers much faster inference.