Improved diagnosis using enhanced fault dominance

Defect diagnosis can benefit from fault dominance relations to reduce the set of defect candidate sites. This paper presents new fault dominance collapsing operators that further reduce the set of candidates considered during the initial phase of diagnosis. In contrast to existing dominance-based methods which operate on pairs of faults, the proposed method operates on sets of faults. Fault-related entities are generated to guide the diagnosis process. The proposed collapsing operators can be used to accelerate effect-cause diagnosis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a higher collapsing ratio than existing methods.