Applying Active Diagnosis to Space Systems by On-Board Control Procedures

TL;DR

This paper introduces ActHyDiag, a framework for active diagnosis in space systems, demonstrating its effectiveness through a real Spacewire network case study and implementation of on-board control procedures.

Contribution

It proposes a new framework for active diagnosis tailored to space systems and validates it with real-world experiments on a Spacewire network.

Findings

ActHyDiag effectively improves diagnosability in space systems.

Experimental results confirm the practical applicability of the proposed plans.

The framework enhances fault detection and isolation capabilities in space environments.

Abstract

The instrumentation of real systems is often designed for control purposes and control inputs are designed to achieve nominal control objectives. Hence, the available measurements may not be sufficient to isolate faults with certainty and diagnoses are ambiguous. Active diagnosis formulates a planning problem to generate a sequence of actions that, applied to the system, enforce diagnosability and allow to iteratively refine ambiguous diagnoses. This paper analyses the requirements for applying active diagnosis to space systems and proposes ActHyDiag as an effective framework to solve this problem. It presents the results of applying ActHyDiag to a real space case study and of implementing the generated plans in the form of On-Board Control Procedures. The case study is a redundant Spacewire Network where up to 6 instruments, monitored and controlled by the on-board software hosted in the Satellite Management Unit, are transferring science data to a mass memory unit through Spacewire routers. Experiments have been conducted on a real physical benchmark developed by Thales Alenia Space and demonstrate the effectiveness of the plans proposed by ActHyDiag.