Diagnosable Systems for Intermittent Faults

Diagnosable systems composed of interconnected units which are capable of testing each other have been studied primarily from the point of view of permanent faults. Along such lines, designs have been proposed, and necessary and sufficient conditions for the diagnosis of such faults have been established. In this paper, we study the intermittent fault diagnosis capabilities of such systems. Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived and bounds are established for some well-known systems. It is seen that in contrast to permanent fault diagnosable systems, there exists only a single type of intermittent fault diagnosable system. A procedure is given to determine the intermittent fault diagnosability of any given system.