Deriving contingencies among diagnostic tests with Prolog by code examination
Richard Denney · Fall joint computer conference · 1987
The SSD (Standard Services Drawer) is part of a new well logging system developed by Schlumberger. A suite of 50 diagnostic tests are used for isolating failures in the SSD hardware. Causality in the hardware is reflected among the tests as contingencies: a test is contingent on another if the failure of the latter may cause the failure of the former. The design engineer uses his knowledge about contingencies among the tests to run them in an order appropriate for locating hardware failures. This paper reports the results of a cursory effort to automatically extract contingencies among these tests by direct examination of their source. PROLOG is used to describe tests and define contingencies.