Diagnostics in the Extendable Integrated Support Environment (EISE)

The Extendable Integration Support Environment (EISE) is a real-time computer network developed by the US Air Force as an engineering tool to support systems level integration, modifications, and enhancements of weapon systems. The EISE approach uses commercially available hardware and software components and offers substantial savings by eliminating unique support environments in favour of sharing common modules for the support of operational weapon systems. An expert system has been developed to help diagnose faults in this network. It is a multilevel, multiexpert diagnostics system which uses experimental-knowledge, structural, functional, and event models. The supervisory reasoning controller is a metalevel reasoner which plans the sequence of steps to solve the given problem. The overall system, called the diagnostic executive, accesses system-level performance checks and error reports and issues remote test procedures to formulate and confirm hypotheses