Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are paving new ground with increasing levels of automation and usage in applications with complex environments, posing greater challenges in terms of safety and reliability. The increasing complexity of CPS environments, tasks, and systems leads to more uncertainties. Unless properly managed, these uncertainties may lead to false detection of real fault condition of a system, which in turn may affect decision making and potentially cause fatal consequences. In order to implement safety-critical missions, such as autonomous driving, it is essential to develop a reliable monitoring and assessment service dealing with the complexity and uncertainty issues. In this article, we propose a fault detection function based on Bayesian inference, which combines empirical knowledge with information of the specific system. By considering uncertainties as possible causes for false detection, various uncertainties during the detection process are analyzed, and the ways to quantify and propagate them are explored. As a result, probabilistic inference is achieved for distinguishing system faults from uncertainties, which contributes to more reliable detection results regarding system faults under dynamically changing environments. A case study on an microelectro mechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer is conducted and the result shows that the fault detection function effectively distinguishes system faults and uncertainties arising from the environment.

New autonomous driving technologies are emerging every day and some of them have been commercially applied in the real world. While benefiting from these technologies, autonomous trucks are facing new challenges in short-term maintenance planning, which directly influences the truck operator’s profit. In this paper, we implement a vehicle health management system by addressing the maintenance planning issues of autonomous trucks on a transport mission. We also present a maintenance planning model using a risk-based decision-making method, which identifies the maintenance decision with minimal economic risk of the truck company. Both availability losses and maintenance costs are considered when evaluating the economic risk. We demonstrate the proposed model by numerical experiments illustrating real-world scenarios. In the experiments, compared to three baseline methods, the expected economic risk of the proposed method is reduced by up to 47%. We also conduct sensitivity analyses of different model parameters. The analyses show that the economic risk significantly decreases when the estimation accuracy of remaining useful life, the maximal allowed time of delivery delay before order cancellation, or the number of workshops increases. The experiment results contribute to identifying future research and development attentions of autonomous trucks from an economic perspective.

New autonomous driving technologies are emerging every day and some of them have been commercially applied in the real world. While benefiting from these technologies, autonomous trucks are facing new challenges in short-term maintenance planning, which directly influences the truck operator's profit. In this paper, we implement a vehicle health management system by addressing the maintenance planning issues of autonomous trucks on a transport mission. We also present a maintenance planning model using a risk-based decision-making method, which identifies the maintenance decision with minimal economic risk of the truck company. Both availability losses and maintenance costs are considered when evaluating the economic risk. We demonstrate the proposed model by numerical experiments illustrating real-world scenarios. In the experiments, compared to three baseline methods, the expected economic risk of the proposed method is reduced by up to 47%. We also conduct sensitivity analyses of different model parameters. The analyses show that the economic risk significantly decreases when the estimation accuracy of remaining useful life, the maximal allowed time of delivery delay before order cancellation, or the number of workshops increases. The experiment results contribute to identifying future research and development attentions of autonomous trucks from an economic perspective.

For human-driven trucks transiting to highly automated ones, we need to make the post-diagnosis decision-making more automated and intelligent, which is critical for vehicle reliability and transport efficiency. For this purpose, we learn from industry practitioners to depict the current post-diagnosis decision-making process in the truck industry and identify the gaps between the current practice and a desired future in a highly automated context. We also design an intelligent post-diagnosis decision support system using advanced technologies to bridge critical gaps. Based on a real-world freight delivery scenario and a risk-based decision-making approach, a concrete instance of the decision support system design is presented as a case study, including the design of graphical user interfaces. This work is mainly for adapting the post-diagnosis decision-making of trucks to a highly automated context and substantially increasing the performance and quality of the decision-making process.