Anomaly detection in monitoring sensor data for preventive maintenance

Today, many industrial companies must face problems raised by maintenance. In particular, the anomaly detection problem is probably one of the most challenging. In this paper we focus on the railway maintenance task and propose to automatically detect anomalies in order to predict in advance potential failures. We first address the problem of characterizing normal behavior. In order to extract interesting patterns, we have developed a method to take into account the contextual criteria associated to railway data (itinerary, weather conditions, etc.). We then measure the compliance of new data, according to extracted knowledge, and provide information about the seriousness and the exact localization of a detected anomaly. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.