Model-based Diagnosis of a Satellite Electrical Power System with RODON

Abstract: As space exploration vehicles travel deeper into space, their distance to earth increases.The increased communication delays and ground personnel costs motivatea migration of the vehicle health management into space. A way to achieve thisis to use a diagnosis system. A diagnosis system uses sensor readings to automaticallydetect faults and possibly locate the cause of it. The diagnosis system usedin this thesis is a model-based reasoning tool called RODON developed by UptimeSolutions AB. RODON uses information of both nominal and faulty behavior ofthe target system mathematically formulated in a model.The advanced diagnostics and prognostics testbed (ADAPT) developed at theNASA Ames Research Center provides a stepping stone between pure researchand deployment of diagnosis and prognosis systems in aerospace systems. Thehardware of the testbed is an electrical power system (EPS) that represents theEPS of a space exploration vehicle. ADAPT consists of a controlled and monitoredenvironment where faults can be injected into a system in a controlled manner andthe performance of the diagnosis system carefully monitored. The main goal of thethesis project was to build a model of the ADAPT EPS that was used to diagnosethe testbed and to generate decision trees (or trouble-shooting trees).The results from the diagnostic analysis were good and all injected faults thataffected the actual function of the EPS were detected. All sensor faults weredetected except faults in temperature sensors. A less detailed model would haveisolated the correct faulty component(s) in the experiments. However, the goal wasto create a detailed model that can detect more than the faults currently injectedinto ADAPT. The created model is stationary but a dynamic model would havebeen able to detect faults in temperature sensors.Based on the presented results, RODON is very well suited for stationary analysisof large systems with a mixture of continuous and discrete signals. It is possibleto get very good results using RODON but in turn it requires an equally goodmodel. A full analysis of the dynamic capabilities of RODON was never conductedin the thesis which is why no conclusions can be drawn for that case.