Multiple catastrophic fault diagnosis of linear circuits considering the component tolerances

The paper deals with the diagnosis of multiple catastrophic faults, being either cuts of some connecting paths or short-circuits of some points, in analogue linear circuits using AC analysis. A method enabling us to detect and identify the faults, taking into account deviations of the circuit parameters within their tolerance ranges, is developed. The method exploits an appropriate fault dictionary, constructed using an efficient approach proposed in this paper. The fault dictionary is used only for preliminary identification of the faults, because it is based on the analysis of the circuit with nominal parameters. The crucial point of the method is a verification procedure, developed in this paper, based on the linear programming approach. It leads to the results considering the component variations within their tolerance ranges. A numerical example illustrates the proposed method and shows its efficiency.