ANR project SODDA: Soft Defects Diagnosis in wired networks

Participants : Thomas Lepetit, Mohamed Oumri, Michel Sorine.

The need for detection, localization and characterization of defects in a cable network has led to the ANR projects SEEDS followed by 0-DEFECT in the automotive domain and INSCAN for cables along railways. These projects provide the foundations of diagnosis methods for cables – with a proof of feasibility in the case of hard defects (short-circuit, open circuit) – and some theoretical results on the associated inverse problems in the case of soft faults. They also made it possible to identify their limits. One of the principal limits of these methods, based on the principles of reflectometry, is the difficulty of detecting soft defects. If it was possible to detect and locate precisely these defects, that would help for preventive maintenance or prognosis. The objective of SODDA is to study the signatures of the soft defects, by combining theory and experiment, and to design and test innovative methods adapted to these signatures which are very difficult to detect. The project is run by an academic consortium, in close connection with an industrial board, responsible for keeping the work in realistic and relevant use cases. The Inria teams involved are I4S (Qinghua Zhang), POEMS and Sisyphe.