Fault Diagnosis of DCV and Heating Systems Based on Causal Relation in Fuzzy Bayesian Belief Networks Using Relation Direction Probabilities

The state-of-the-art provides data-driven and knowledge-driven diagnostic methods. Each category has its strengths and shortcomings. The knowledge-driven methods rely mainly on expert knowledge and resemble the diagnostic thinking of domain experts with a high capacity in the reasoning of uncertainties, diagnostics of different fault severities, and understandability. However, these methods involve higher and more time-consuming effort; they require a deep understanding of the causal relationships between faults and symptoms; and there is still a lack of automatic approaches to improving the efficiency. The data-driven methods rely on similarities and patterns, and they are very sensitive to changes of patterns and have more accuracy than the knowledge-driven methods, but they require massive data for training, cannot inform about the reason behind the result, and represent black boxes with low understandability. The research problem is thus the combination of knowledge-driven and data-driven diagnosis in DCV and heating systems, to benefit from both categories. The diagnostic method presented in this paper involves less effort for experts without requiring deep understanding of the causal relationships between faults and symptoms compared to existing knowledge-driven methods, while offering high understandability and high accuracy. The fault diagnosis uses a data-driven classifier in combination with knowledge-driven inference with both fuzzy logic and a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). In offline mode, for each fault class, a Relation-Direction Probability (RDP) table is computed and stored in a fault library. In online mode, we determine the similarities between the actual RDP and the offline precomputed RDPs. The combination of BBN and fuzzy logic in our introduced method analyzes the dependencies of the signals using Mutual Information (MI) theory. The results show the performance of the combined classifier is comparable to the data-driven method while maintaining the strengths of the knowledge-driven methods.