Modelling of patterns between operational data, diagnostic trouble codes and workshop history using big data and machine learning

Abstract: The work presented in this thesis is part of a large research and development project on condition-based maintenance for heavy trucks and buses at Scania. The aim of this thesis was to be able to predict the status of a component (the starter motor) using data mining methods and to create models that can predict the failure of that component. Based on workshop history data, error codes and operational data, three sets of classification models were built and evaluated. The first model aims to find patterns in a set of error codes, to see which codes are related to a starter motor failure. The second model aims to see if there are patterns in operational data that lead to the occurrence of an error code. Finally, the two data sets were merged and a classifier was trained and evaluated on this larger data set. Two machine learning algorithms were used and compared throughout the model building: AdaBoost and random forest. There is no statistically significant difference in their performance, and both algorithms had an error rate around ~13%, ~5% and ~13% for the three classification models respectively. However, random forest is much faster, and is therefore the preferable option for an industrial implementation. Variable analysis was conducted for the error codes and operational data, resulting in rankings of informative variables. From the evaluation metric precision, it can be derived that if our random forest model predicts a starter motor failure, there is a 85.7% chance that it actually has failed. This model finds 32% (the models recall) of the failed starter motors. It is also shown that four error codes; 2481, 2639, 2657 and 2597 have the highest predictive power for starter motor failure classification. For the operational data, variables that concern the starter motor lifetime and battery health are generally ranked as important by the models. The random forest model finds 81.9% of the cases where the 2481 error code occurs. If the random forest model predicts that the error code 2481 will occur, there is a 88.2% chance that it will. The classification performance was not increased when the two data sets were merged, indicating that the patterns detected by the two first classification models do not add value toone another.