Self-organized Modeling for Vehicle Fleet Based Fault Detection

Operators of fleets of vehicles desire the best possible availability and usage of their vehicles. This means the preference is that maintenance of a vehicle is scheduled with as long intervals as possible. However, it is then important to be able to detect if a component in a specific vehicle is not functioning properly earlier than expected (due to e.g. manufacturing variations). This paper proposes a telematic based fault detection scheme for enabling fault detection for diagnostics by using a population of vehicles. The basic idea is that it is possible to create low-dimensional representations of a sub-system or component in a vehicle, where the representation (or model parameters) of a vehicle can be monitored for changes compared to the model parameters observed in a fleet of vehicles. If a model in a vehicle is found to deviate compared to a group of models from a fleet of vehicles, then the vehicle is judged to need diagnostics for that component (assuming the deviation in the model cannot be attributed to e.g. a different driver behavior). The representation should be low-dimensional so it is possible to have it transferred over a limited wireless communication channel to a communications center where the comparison is made. The algorithm is shown to be able to detect leakage on simulated data from a cooling system, work is currently in progress for detecting other types of faults.