High performance sensors and modern data logging technology with real-time telemetry facilitate system fault diagnosis in a very precise manner. Fault detection, isolation and identification in fault diagnosis systems are typical steps to analyze the root cause of failures. This systematic failure analysis provides not only useful clues to rectify the abnormal behaviors of a system, but also key information to redesign the current system for retrofit. The main barriers to effective failure analysis are: (i) the gathered data (event) logs are too large in general, and further (ii) they usually contain noise and redundant data that make precise analysis difficult. This paper therefore applies suitable pre-processing techniques to data reduction and feature extraction, and then converts the reduced data log into a new format of event sequence information. Finally the event sequence information is decoded to investigate the correlation between specific event patterns and various system faults. The efficiency of the developed pre-filtering procedure is examined with a terminal box data log of a marine diesel engine.

This paper introduces a failure analysis procedure that underpins real-time fault prognosis. In the previous study, we developed a systematic eventization procedure which makes it possible to reduce the original data size into a manageable one in the form of event logs and eventually to extract failure patterns efficiently from the reduced data. Failure patterns are then extracted in the form of event sequences by sequence-mining algorithms, (e.g. FP-Tree algorithm). Extracted patterns are stored in a failure pattern library, and eventually, we use the stored failure pattern information to predict potential failures. The two practical case studies (marine diesel engine and SIRIUS-II car engine) provide empirical support for the performance of the proposed failure analysis procedure. This procedure can be easily extended for wide application fields of failure analysis such as vehicle and machine diagnostics. Furthermore, it can be applied to human health monitoring & prognosis, so that human body signals could be efficiently analyzed.