Diagnosing novel faults

Currently available diagnostic expert systems are limited as they cannot address novel situations and faults. Moreover, they cannot recognize such situations, which often lead to an incorrect diagnosis or at best an exhaustive search through their knowledge bases. The CONSOLIDATE system is a hybrid diagnostic system which integrates experiential and causal-model-based knowledge sources, which retains the efficiency of experiential-based approaches while providing a mechanism to recognize and address previously unobserved situations. A discussion is given the CONSOLIDATE system, issues related to novel fault hypothesis generation, and the approach utilized to address these issues