TEAMS-RT

Real-Time Embedded Diagnostics and Reasoner

Mobile or geographically remote equipment often lacks the connectivity needed to communicate with an online diagnostic system like TEAMS. Without the availability of sophisticated and accurate diagnostics for this equipment, field maintenance calls may escalate, driving up service support costs and taxing support organizations. To overcome this shortcoming, QSI has developed TEAMS-RT, a real-time version of TEAMS that runs as an embedded process on the target device. TEAMS-RT is a fast and compact reasoner that runs on your instrument’s (or other system’s) on-board computer, delivering real-time diagnostics and system health monitoring. Using a subset of the TEAMS vehicle or machine model, this software processes the results of on-board, built-in tests to perform diagnostics. The software is designed to assist end-users and systems operators as well as technicians and field engineers. TEAMS-RT is ideally suited to IHM (Integrated Health Management) applications.

Traditional embedded diagnostics are generally perform a limited range of tests and use inflexible, hard-coded logic. TEAMS-RT, by comparison, has deeper visibility into the equipment under test, offering a much broader range of diagnostics that are ideally suited to complex system and problems. Using a table or matrix of the relationship between on-board tests and the equipment failures, TEAMS-RT makes use of all test results (positive and negative) to isolate the true root cause. It also overcomes the problem faced by every “hardcoded” diagnostic subsystem – handling all possible combinations of positive and negative test results. The scope of this task quickly becomes too large, as the number of test combinations grows exponentially with the number of inputs. TEAMS-RT solves this problem, amplifies the diagnostic performance, and presents a tabular (matrix) solution that is easy to validate and maintain.

TEAMS-RT Architecture

An efficient way to represent and use the TEAMS model, TEAMS-RT can be easily installed on the onboard computer of a vehicle or other machine. Features unique to TEAMS-RT include:

• Efficient real-time processing of sensor results, including false alarms and missed detections
• Updates of fault-test point dependencies in response to system mode changes
• Updates of dependencies resulting from failures in redundant components

Fast and smart

TEAMS-RT embeds the expertise of your top design and diagnostic engineers, helping you to resolve difficult, multi-symptom/multi-fault problems in real-time. System inputs and diagnostics include:

• Sensor data
• Signal processing
• Fixed parameters and specifications
• Analytical models
• Trending
• Range checking
• Dynamic thresholding
• Component health status
• Test information fusion

Performance is impressively fast. In a mere 1/10^th of a second, TEAMS-RT can process 1000 sensor results and diagnose multiple faults in a 1000-component system with 80 modes of operation. As an embedded process, TEAMS-RT can continuously monitor the health of any system and rapidly identify any operational failures. Unlike competing solutions, diagnostic performance remains high even under difficult multi-fault conditions.

Simulation Results for TEAMS-RT on a 1000×1000 System