Representation of failure context for diagnosis of technical applications

Development and maintenance of a case-base is known to be one of the most difficult problems in real-world applicati on of case-based diagnosis systems. The complexity of large technical applicat ions result in large numbers of possible inter- and intra-system failures. Devel opment of fault diagnosis systems for a rolling stock application and a batte ry emergency backup system showed that a base of fault cases is insufficient t o accurately diagnose failures. The context of where and how problems occur should also be considered, such as the configuration and operational conditions of the application. This paper presents a model for the representation of this con text for technical applications. The context information is applied for the represen tation, retrieval and retainment of cases.