Techniques to encode and compress fault dictionaries

Dictionary encoding schemes have not addressed the cost of reconstructing the dictionary during fault location. We show that by modifying a previously proposed dictionary encoding scheme only small portions of the information need be reconstructed during fault location. This provides a mechanism to reduce the number of secondary accesses during fault location. For pass-fail dictionaries, we present a simplified encoding scheme that reduces both the secondary storage requirement as well as the number of secondary accesses. A novel dictionary structure, known as hybrid dictionaries, which retains the full resolution with respect to modeled faults is presented. Heuristics to compute such dictionaries, its usefulness and how such dictionaries can be encoded for quick information retrieval are discussed