Machine Learning Models for Predictive Maintenance

Sammanfattning: The amount of goods produced and transported around the world each year increases and heavy-duty trucks are an important link in the logistic chain. To guarantee reliable delivery a high degree of availability is required, i.e., avoid standing by the road unable to continue the transport mission. Unplanned stops by the road do not only cost due to the delay in delivery, but can also lead to damaged cargo. Vehicle downtime can be reduced by replacing components based on statistics of previous failures. However, such an approach is both expensive due to the required frequent visits to a workshop and inefficient as many components from the vehicles in the fleet are still operational. A prognostic method, allowing for vehicle individualized maintenance plans, therefore poses a significant potential in the automotive field. The prognostic method estimates component degradation and remaining useful life based on recorded data and how the vehicle has been operated.Lead-acid batteries is a part of the electrical power system in a heavy-duty truck, primarily responsible for powering the starter motor but also powering auxiliary units, e.g., cabin heating and kitchen equipment, which makes the battery a vital component for vehicle availability. Developing physical models of battery degradation is a difficult process which requires access to battery health sensing that is not available in the given study as well a detailed knowledge of battery chemistry.An alternative approach, considered in this work, is data-driven methods based on large amounts of logged data describing vehicle operation conditions. In the use-case studied, recorded data is not closely related to battery health which makes battery prognostic challenging. Data is collected during infrequent and non-equidistant visits to a workshop and there are complex dependencies between variables in the data. The main aim of this work has been to develop a framework and methods for estimating lifetime of lead-acid batteries using data-driven methods for condition-based maintenance. The methodology is general and can be applicable for prognostics of other components.A main contribution of the thesis is development of machine learning models for predictive maintenance, estimating conditional reliability functions, using Random Survival Forests (RSF) and recurrent neural networks (RNN). An important property of the data is that for a specific vehicle there may be multiple data readouts, but also one single data readout which makes predictive modeling challenging and dealing with this situation is discussed for both RSF and neural networks models. Data quality is important when building data-driven models, and here the data is imbalanced since there are few battery failures relative to the number of vehicles. Further, the data includes many uninformative variables and among those that are informative, there are complex dependencies and correlation. Methods for selecting which data features to use in the model in this situation is also a key contribution. When a point estimation of the conditional reliability functions is available, it is of interest to know how uncertain the estimate is as it allows to take quality of the prediction into account when deciding on maintenance actions. A theory for estimating the variance of the RSF predictor is another contribution in the thesis. To conclude, the results show that Long Short-Term Memory networks, which is a type of RNN, is the most suitable for the vehicle operational data and give the best performance among methods evaluated in the thesis.