Applied Data Science: Solving a Predictive Maintenance Business Problem

The use case involved is to predict the end life of large industrial batteries, which falls under the genre of use cases called preventive maintenance use cases.



Formulating the Predictive Problem : Connecting the dots……

To help formulate the predictive problem, let us revisit the business problem we have at hand and then connect it with the data points which we have at hand.  The predictive problem requires us to predict two things

  1. Which battery will fail &
  2.  Which period of time in future will the battery fail.

Since the prediction is at a battery level, our unit of reference for formulating the predictive problem is individual battery. This means that all the variables which are present across the multiple data sets have to be consolidated at the individual battery level.

The next question is, at what period of time do we have to consolidate the variables for each battery ? To answer this question, we will have to look at the frequency of data collection for each variable. In the case of our battery data set, the data points for each of the variables are capture at different intervals. In addition the volume of data collected for each of those variables at those instances of time also vary substantially.

  • Conductance : One reading of a battery captured once every 3 days.
  • Voltage & Temperature : 4-5 readings per battery captured every day.
  • Discharge : A set of reading captured every second at different intervals of a day once every 3 months (approximately 4500 – 5000 data points collected in a day).

Since we have to predict the probability of failure at a period of time in future, we will have to have our model learn the behavior of these variables across time periods. However we have to select a time period, where we will have sufficient data points for each of the variables. The ideal time period we should choose in this scenario is every 3 months as discharge data is available only once every 3 months. This would mean that all the data points for each battery for each variable would have to be consolidated to a single record for every 3 months. So if each battery has around 3 years of data it would entail 12 records for a battery.

DataConsolidation

Another aspect we have to look at is how 3 months of data points for a battery can be consolidated to make one record corresponding to each variable. For this we have to resort to some suitable form of consolidation metric for each variable. What that consolidation metric should be can be finalized after exploratory analysis and feature engineering . We will deal with those aspects in detail when we talk about exploratory analysis and feature engineering phases.

The next important point which we have to deal with would be the labeling of the response variable. Since the business problem is to predict which battery would fail, the response variable would be classifying whether a record of a battery falls under a failure class or not. However there is a lacunae in this approach. What we want is to predict well ahead of time when a battery is likely to fail and therefore we will have to factor in the “when” part also into the classification task. This would entail, looking at samples of batteries which has actually failed and identifying the point of time when failure happened. We label that point as “failure point” and then look back in time from the failure point to classify periods leading to failure. Since the consolidation period for data points is three months, we can fix the “looking back” period also to be 3 months. This would mean, for those samples of batteries where we know the failure point, we look at the record which is one time period( 3 months) before failure and label the data as 1 period before failure, record of data which corresponds to 6 month before failure will be labelled as 2 periods before failure and so on. We can continue labeling the data according to periods before failure, till we reach a comfortable point in time ahead of failure ( say 1 year). If the comfortable period we have in mind is 1 year, we would have 4 failure classes i.e 1 period before failure, 2 periods before failure, 3 periods before failure and 4 periods before failure. All records before the 1 year period of time can be labelled as “Normal Periods”. This labeling strategy will mean that our predictive problem is a multinomial classification problem, with 5 classes ( 4 failure period classes and 1 normal period class).

Failure-Labelling

The above discussed, labeling strategy is for samples of batteries within our data set which have actually failed and where we know when the failure has happened. However if we do not have information about the list of batteries which have failed and which have not failed, we have to resort to intense exploratory analysis to first determine samples of batteries which have failed and then label them according to the labeling strategy discussed above. We can discuss about how we can use exploratory analysis to identify batteries which have failed, in the next post. Needless to say, the records of all batteries which have not failed, will be labelled as “Normal Periods”.

Now that we have seen the predictive problem formulation part, let us recap our discussions so far. The predictive problem formulation step involves the following

  1. Understand the business problem and formulate the response variables.
  2. Identify the unit of reference to which the business problem will apply ( each battery in our case)
  3. Look at the key variables related to the unit of reference and the volume and velocity at which data for these variables are generated
  4. Depending on the velocity of data, decide on a data consolidation period and identify the number of records which will be present for the unit of reference.
  5. From the data set, identify those units which have failed and which have not failed. Such information will generally be available from past maintenance contracts for each units.
  6. Adopt a labeling strategy for both the failed units and normal units. Identify the number of classes which will be applied to all records of the units. For the failed units, label the records as failed classes till a convenient period( 1 year in this case). All records before that period will be labelled the same as the units which have not failed ( “Normal Periods”)

Wrapping up till we meet again

So far we have discussed the initial two phase of a data science project . The first phase entails defining the business problem and carrying out the business discovery. In the next phase, which is the data discovery phase, we align the available data points to the business problem and then formulate the predictive problem. Once we have a clear understanding of how the predictive problem have to be formulated our next task will be to get into exploratory analysis and feature engineering phases. These phases and the subsequent phases would be dealt in detail in the next post of this series. Watch out this space for more.

 
Bio: Thomas Joseph is Senior Data Scientist at Aspire Systems, working on growing the Data Science footprint and enabling superior delivery.

Original. Reposted with permission.

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