Active Diagnosis in Distributed Embedded Systems Based on the Time-Triggered Execution of Semantic Web Queries

Active diagnosis aims at significantly improving system reliability by computing diagnostic information at run-time for fault isolation and online error recovery. The presented work extends semantic techniques, usually used in large-scale IT systems, for active diagnosis in open embedded real time systems. Open embedded systems (e.g., ambient assisted living for elderly care, critical infrastructures, health management and medical systems) exhibit real-time and reliability requirements, while the constituent components are unknown at design time. Time-triggered diagnostic inference supports the incremental generation of symptoms, which result from the temporal and spatial decomposition of the diagnostic analysis process. The methods and algorithms are prototypically implemented, as well as experimentally evaluated. The paper demonstrates that dynamic semantic web services in combination with time-triggered scheduling techniques are suitable to enable active diagnosis in open embedded systems with reliability and real-time requirements.