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Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate new approaches to the cost effective design of fault isolation procedures. This effort is oriented specifically toward the design of built-in-test (BIT) diagnostic subsystems for modular military electronics equipment. The objective is to minimize the average costs associated with the repair of electronic systems.Following an equipment malfunction the BIT automatically executes diagnostic tests to isolate the group of modules which contains the faulty unit. Secondary isolation is then performed, by semi-automatic or manual means, to locate the failed unit within a group of modules identified by the BIT primary diagnostic.A basic problem which has been investigated is how to partition the equipment into near optimum groups of modules, such that the average cost of isolating the faulty unit is minimized. A new heuristic approach applied to this problem involves the use of dynamic programming to derive weights for the groups of modules, and a binary linear program to produce a low cost partition based on these weights.