Evaluation of Self-Organized Approach for Predicting Compressor Faults in a City Bus Fleet

Abstract

Managing the maintenance of a commercial vehicle fleet is an attractive application domain of ubiquitous knowledge discovery. Cost effective methods for predictive maintenance are progressively demanded in the automotive industry. The traditional diagnostic paradigm that requires human experts to define models is not scalable to today's vehicles with hundreds of computing units and thousands of control and sensor signals streaming through the on-board controller area network. A more autonomous approach must be developed. In this paper the authors evaluate the performance of the COSMO approach for automatic detection of air pressure related faults on a fleet of city buses. The method is both generic and robust. Histograms of a single pressure signal are collected and compared across the fleet and deviations are matched against workshop maintenance and repair records. It is shown that the method can detect several of the cases when compressors fail on the road, well before the failure. The work is based on data from a three year long field study involving 19 buses operating in and around a city on the west coast of Sweden.