Data mining of temporal sequences for the prediction of infrequent failure events : application on floating train data for predictive maintenance
Wissam Sammouri · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2014
In order to meet the mounting social and economic demands, railway operators and manufacturers are striving for a longer availability and a better reliability of railway transportation systems. Commercial trains are being equipped with state-of-the-art onboard intelligent sensors monitoring various subsystems all over the train. These sensors provide real-time flow of data, called floating train data, consisting of georeferenced events, along with their spatial and temporal coordinates. Once ordered with respect to time, these events can be considered as long temporal sequences which can be mined for possible relationships. This has created a neccessity for sequential data mining techniques in order to derive meaningful associations rules or classification models from these data. Once discovered, these rules and models can then be used to perform an on-line analysis of the incoming event stream in order to predict the occurrence of target events, i.e, severe failures that require immediate corrective maintenance actions. The work in this thesis tackles the above mentioned data mining task. We aim to investigate and develop various methodologies to discover association rules and classification models which can help predict rare tilt and traction failures in sequences using past events that are less critical. The investigated techniques constitute two major axes: Association analysis, which is temporal and Classification techniques, which is not temporal. The main challenges confronting the data mining task and increasing its complexity are mainly the rarity of the target events to be predicted in addition to the heavy redundancy of some events and the frequent occurrence of data bursts. The results obtained on real datasets collected from a fleet of trains allows to highlight the effectiveness of the approaches and methodologies used