A novel ontology-based method to represent and classify failure modes of sensors

It is generally recognized that sensors play important roles in modern control systems and failure modes of sensors are key points for safety and reliability analysis of such systems. Failure modes rely only on specific components rather than the system architecture, and therefore could be reused in different analysis. In this paper, we present a novel ontology-based method to represent and classify failure modes of sensors, so that they could be reused effectively and sufficiently. The principle and essence of the method are described in details appending a demonstration illustrating how to construct a concrete ontology with the method. Furthermore, the retrieve method based on semantic similarity is introduced. Additionally, a free software tool is developed for the method. The method and the tool could both be used in other fields with similar scenarios.