The main objective of this work is to combine the concept of fault model free diagnosis simultaneously with cause-effect and effect-cause analysis in digital networks. We consider the diagnosis as a two step task: first, to locate a subset of faulty blocks in a network by using block level fault dictionaries, second, to locate the faulty block in this subset by effect-cause analysis. The size of the fault dictionary depends linearly on the number of blocks to be determined as faulty or not faulty. We propose a measure for evaluating the block-level diagnostic resolution of a given network, and show how this measure can be used for guiding effect-cause diagnostic analysis. Experimental results provide the data which characterize the proposed measure.
Keywords: digital networks, block-level fault diagnosis, cause-effect and effect-cause analysis, diagnostic resolution