A system includes a controller configured to store a relationship matrix of a plurality of diagnostic estimators and a plurality of failure modes, each failure mode represents a type of failure that can occur with (i) a sensor or (ii) a vehicle component of a vehicle system, each diagnostic estimator is associated with a respective subset of the failure modes, each respective subset defines a control volume within the vehicle system that contains at least one of (i) one or more sensors or (ii) one or more vehicle components; store a healthy diagnostic vector regarding nominal operational parameters of the vehicle system; acquire diagnostic information regarding current operational parameters of the vehicle system to generate an error diagnostic vector; divide the error diagnostic vector by the healthy diagnostic vector to generate a ratio diagnostic vector; multiply the ratio diagnostic vector with the relationship matrix to generate a value for each failure mode.