Multiple soft fault diagnosis of nonlinear dc circuits considering component tolerances

This paper is devoted to multiple soft fault diagnosis of analog nonlinear circuits. A two-stage algorithm is offered enabling us to locate the faulty circuit components and evaluate their values, considering the component tolerances. At first a preliminary diagnostic procedure is performed, under the assumption that the non-faulty components have nominal values, leading to approximate and tentative results. Then, they are corrected, taking into account the fact that the non-faulty components can assume arbitrary values within their tolerance ranges. This stage of the algorithm is carried out using the linear programming method. As a result some ranges are obtained including possible values of the faulty components. The proposed approach is illustrated with two numerical examples.