Section: Application Domains

Electrical cable and network monitoring

The fast development of electronic devices in modern engineering systems comes with more and more connections through cables, and consequently, the reliability of electric connections becomes a crucial issue. For example, in a modern automotive vehicle, the total length of onboard cables has tremendously increased during the last decades and is now up to 4km. These wires and connectors are subject to ageing or degradation because of severe environmental conditions. In this area, reliability becomes a safety issue. In some other domains, cable defects may have catastrophic consequences. It is thus a crucial challenge to design smart embedded diagnosis systems able to detect wired connection defects in real time. This fact has motivated research projects on methods for fault diagnosis in electric transmission lines and wired networks. Original methods have been recently developed by Inria, notably based on the inverse scattering theory, for cable and network monitoring. Further developments concern both theoretic study and industrial applications.