A GRAPHICAL APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF LOCATING THE ORIGIN OF THE SYSTEM FAILURE
Masao Iri, Katsuaki Aoki, Eiji O’Shima, Hisayoshi Matsuyama · Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan · 1980
This paper presents a way of formulating the problem of locating the origin of a system failure. A signed digraph is used for a mathematical model representing the influences among elements of the system, and the concept of a pattern on the signed digraph is introduced for representing a state of the system. The representations are quite rough and qualitative. The origin of a failure of the system can be located in terms of these concepts. It is further pointed out that, even when the pattern can be observed partially, the assumption of a single origin of the failure enables us to restrict the possible range of the origin to some extent.