Multiple Soft Fault Diagnosis of Nonlinear Circuits Using the Continuation Method

This paper offers a method for multiple soft fault diagnosis of nonlinear static circuits. The method enables us to locate the faulty elements and evaluate their parameters. It exploits a set of n nonlinear algebraic type diagnostic equations in n unknown variables and is oriented on finding multiple solutions of these equations. As a result, the method is capable of finding, in systematic manner, different sets of the parameters which satisfy the diagnostic test, rather than one specific set. For this purpose the continuation (homotopy) approach is applied and an efficient procedure for tracing a homotopy path is developed. The proposed method is especially useful at the pre-production stage, where corrections of the technological process are possible and the diagnostic time is not crucial. To illustrate the proposed approach two numerical examples are given.