On-Board Predictive Maintenance with Machine Learning

Field Issue (Malfunction) incidents are costly for the manufacturer’s service department. Especially for commercial truck providers, downtime can be the biggest concern for our customers. To reduce warranty cost and improve customer confidence in our products, preventive maintenance provides the benefit of fixing the problem when it is small and reducing downtime of scheduled targeted service time. However, a normal telematics system has difficulty in capturing useful information even with pre-set triggers. Some malfunction issue takes weeks to find the root cause due to the difficulty of repeating the error in a different vehicle and engineers must analyze large amounts of data. In order to solve these challenges, a machine-learning-based predictive software/hardware system has been implemented. Multiple machine learning techniques, including CNN(Convolutional Neural Network), have been utilized in the proposed pipeline to: 1) decide when to record data. 2) decide what data to record. 3) root cause diagnostics on the spot based on time-series data analysis. A novel technique has been proposed to solve the lack of training data for the root cause analysis neural network. The root cause analysis will be further reviewed by engineers through an expert knowledge feedback system to guide the on-board AI. In this paper, the overall on-board preventive maintenance system will be introduced, and validation results will be shown.