Sensor-Based Predictive Maintenance with Reduction of False Alarms—A Case Study in Heavy Industry

In this paper, the problem of the identification of undesirable events is discussed. Such events can be poorly represented in the historical data, and it is predominantly impossible to learn from past examples. The discussed issue is considered in the work in the context of two use cases in which vibration and temperature measurements collected by wireless sensors are analysed. These use cases include crushers at a coal-fired power plant and gantries in a steelworks converter. The awareness, resulting from the cooperation with industry, of the need for a system that works in cold start conditions and does not flood the machine operator with alarms was the motivation for proposing a new predictive maintenance method. The proposed solution is based on the methods of outlier identification. These methods are applied to the collected data that was transformed into a multidimensional feature vector. The novelty of the proposed solution stems from the creation of a methodology for the reduction of false positive alarms, which was applied to a system identifying undesirable events. This methodology is based on the adaptation of the system to the analysed data, the interaction with the dispatcher, and the use of the XAI (eXplainable Artificial Intelligence) method. The experiments performed on several data sets showed that the proposed method reduced false alarms by 90.25% on average in relation to the performance of the stand-alone outlier detection method. The obtained results allowed for the implementation of the developed method to a system operating in a real industrial facility. The conducted research may be valuable for systems with a cold start problem where frequent alarms can lead to discouragement and disregard for the system by the user.