Rune Prytz

Predicting the need for vehicle compressor repairs using maintenance records and logged vehicle data

Methods and results are presented for applying supervised machine learning techniques to the task of predicting the need for repairs of air compressors in commercial trucks and buses. Prediction models are derived from logged on-board data that are downloaded during workshop visits and have been collected over three years on a large number of vehicles. A number of issues are identified with the data sources, many of which originate from the fact that the data sources were not designed for data mining. Nevertheless, exploiting this available data is very important for the automotive industry as means to quickly introduce predictive maintenance solutions. It is shown on a large data set from heavy duty trucks in normal operation how this can be done and generate a profit.Random forest is used as the classifier algorithm, together with two methods for feature selection whose results are compared to a human expert. The machine learning based features outperform the human expert features, which supports the idea to use data mining to improve maintenance operations in this domain.

A field test with self-organized modeling for knowledge discovery in a fleet of city buses

Fleets of commercial vehicles represent an excellent real life setting for ubiquitous knowledge discovery. There are many electronic control units onboard a modern bus or truck, with hundreds of signals being transmitted between them on the controller area network. The growing complexity of the vehicles has lead to a significant desire to have systems for fault detection, remote diagnostics and maintenance prediction. This paper aims to show that it is possible to discover useful diagnostic knowledge by a self-organized algorithm in the scenario of a fleet of city buses. The approach is demonstrated as a process consisting of two parts; Unsupervised modeling (where interesting features are discovered) and Guided search (where the previously found features are coupled to additional information sources). The modeling part searches for simple linear models in a group of vehicles, where interesting features are selected based on both non-randomness in relations and variability in the group. It is shown in an eight months long data collection study that this approach was able to discover features related to broken wheelspeed sensors. Strikingly, deviations in these features (for the vehicles with broken sensors) can be observed up to several months before a breakdown occur. This potentially allows for sufficient time to schedule the vehicle for maintenance and prepare the workshop with relevant components.

Towards a Machine Learning Algorithm for Predicting Truck Compressor Failures Using Logged Vehicle Data

Predictive maintenance is becoming more and more important for the commercial vehicle manufactures, as focus shifts from product- to service-based operation. The idea is to provide a dynamic mainte ...