Using Ontologies in Failure Analysis

Fault analysis is a complex task that requires electrical engineers to perform various analyses to detect and localize a physical defect. The analysis process is very knowledge-intensive and must be precisely documented to report the issue to customers as well as to ensure the best possible reuse of the acquired experience in similar future analyses. However, writing unambiguous documentation can be complicated for many reasons, such as selecting details and results to be presented in a report, or the naming of terms and their definition. To avoid some of these issues, FA engineers must agree on a clearly defined terminology specifying methods, physical faults and their electrical signatures, tools, and relations between them. Moreover, to allow FA software systems to use this terminology, it must be stored in a format that can be interpreted similarly by both engineers and software. This paper presents an approach that solves these challenges by using an ontology describing FA-relevant terminology using a logic-based representation. The latter guarantees the same interpretation of the defined terms by engineers and software systems, which can use it to perform various tasks like text classification, information retrieval, or workflow verification.