Patent 7251582 was granted and assigned to Rolls-Royce on July, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Methods for estimating performance of and/or detecting faults in components of a multi-component system, where the performance of each component is defined by one or more performance parameters x related to measurement parameters z that can be expressed as a function of the performance and operating parameters defining an operating condition of the system. The methods include: defining a series of fault classes corresponding to possible outcomes of faulty components; creating an initial population of strings for each fault class, each including a plurality of elements corresponding to the performance and operating parameters, values being assigned to the string elements which represent estimated values of said parameters and are constrained only to indicate fault affected values for performance parameters of the fault affected component of the respective class; and optimising an objective function which gives a measure of the consistency between measured and calculated values of the measurement parameters.