INTELLIGENT FAULT-DIAGNOSIS AT THE AUSTRALIA TELESCOPE

The Fault Diagnosis Expert System for the Australia Telescope analyses approximately 12000 items of monitor data every minute that report th e health and stability of specific components and signal pathways in t he array. These data are divided into signatures which are matched aga inst signatures of known failure modes to diagnose problems with the a rray. Knowledge about many of the failures is acquired by generating t hem in earlier tests. The system keeps a six-hour history of the detai led behaviour of all monitor data as well as the visibilities. It arch ives the data in half-hour intervals, characterising the interval with a small set of robust statistical estimators. An interactive graphica l user interface allows the simultaneous display of twenty-four histor ies of either the 6-hour data or one week of the characterised data, t ogether with options for plotting one history against another and for calculating their robust regression.