A Context Aware Unsupervised Predictive Maintenance

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (2023) 60:521–547
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-022-00744-2
A context‑aware unsupervised predictive maintenance

solution for fleet management
Apostolos Giannoulidis1 · Anastasios Gounaris1
Received: 26 May 2022 / Revised: 29 August 2022 / Accepted: 31 August 2022 /

Published online: 17 September 2022
© The Author(s) 2022
Abstract
We deal with the problem of predictive maintenance (PdM) in a vehicle fleet management
setting following an unsupervised streaming anomaly detection approach. We investigate
a variety of unsupervised methods for anomaly detection, such as proximity-based, hybrid
(statistical and proximity-based) and transformers. The proposed methods can properly
model the context in which each member of the fleet operates. In our case, the context is
both crucial for effective anomaly detection and volatile, which calls for streaming solu-
tions that take into account only the recent values. We propose two novel techniques, a
2-stage proximity-based one and context-aware transformers along with advanced thresh-
olding. In addition, to allow for testing PdM techniques for vehicle fleets in a fair and
reproducible manner, we build a new fleet-like benchmarking dataset based on an existing
dataset of turbofan simulations. Our evaluation results show that our proposals reduce the
maintenance costs compared to existing solutions.
Keywords Predictive maintenance · Anomaly detection · Outlier detection · Vehicle fleet

management
1 Introduction
Proper maintenance of the industrial equipment is important and, traditionally, mainte-

nance is scheduled based on empirical rules or statistics, such as the average time that a
component of the equipment is damaged, or simply takes place after a component’s failure.
These techniques often lead to both over- and under-estimates of the period in which main-
tenance should be performed, which, in turn, leads to waste, such as spendings on unnec-
essary maintenance and unforeseen suspensions of production. Predictive maintenance
(PdM) provides a promising solution to all these problems, since it has been reported that it
can achieve quality production operation with decreased maintenance costs (Scully, 2019).
* Apostolos Giannoulidis
agiannous@csd.auth.gr
* Anastasios Gounaris
gounaria@csd.auth.gr
1
Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
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Vol.:(0123456789)
522 Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (2023) 60:521–547
Modern PdM techniques are data-driven and employ several advanced techniques
from the area of data management and machine learning, e.g., Carvalho et al. (2019)
and Kovalev et al. (2018). There are two main characteristics in the state-of-the-art: (i)
most PdM techniques rely on labeled data and model training (Carvalho et al., 2019);
and (ii) techniques tend to be application-dependent without evidence that can effi-
ciently generalize to arbitrary industrial settings (Korvesis et al., 2018; Carvalho et al.,
2019; Kovalev et al., 2018). In this work, we also focus on a specific setting, namely
vehicle fleet (VF) management, but we depart from the mainstream rationale in that we
do not employ supervised learning. This alleviates the need for relying on the existence
of appropriate labeled training data.
Most PdM applications are deployed in industrial environments with the objective
to avoid failures in major equipment. Most commonly, equipment is used for a spe-
cific repetitive task in the production line in a setting that remains constant over time.
In contrast, vehicles operate in a volatile environment, e.g., under different weather
conditions (rain, cold, sun, and so on) on a variety of roads and at different speeds.
The driver is part of the dynamic environment as well. So, PdM in vehicles needs to
address additional challenges due to the dynamic environment the VF operates (The-
issler et al., 2021), which results in changes in the vehicle’s behavior over time. How-
ever, such changes should be considered along with their context; they may not corre-
spond to failures and interestingly, non-changes may also denote anomalous behavior.
Figure 1 shows an example of monitored histograms of a vehicle in our test dataset
at three different days; the real-world dataset that we employ consists of such histo-
grams. The leftmost histogram corresponds to a period immediately before a failure,
while the two other histograms refer to normal operation. Comparing the leftmost his-
togram with the normal ones, e.g., using the Hellinger distance, does not provide any
evidence about a forthcoming damage. Also, labeling the leftmost histogram as anom-
alous and using it for model training does not work. However, taking into account the
behavior of similar vehicles during the same period operating in the same context can
help us to identify the need for maintenance in the first case. Overall, we cannot build
traditional machine learning models regarding the normality of a vehicle using super-
vised methods easily; PdM solutions in a dynamic context call for the development of
unsupervised context-aware techniques.
To develop context-aware PdM techniques, we can distinguish between normal and
anomalous behavior based on data that are collected in the same context as our target com-
ponent. By target component, we refer to the member of the fleet, for which we try to detect
deviations that correspond to failures in the close future. An external factor could lead to
a change in the normal operation of the equipment and such a change does not necessarily
imply a future failure; thus we do not aim to detect changes but deviations from the behav-
ior of similar vehicles in the same context.
Fig. 1 Daily histograms of air pressure monitored signals of the same vehicle in three different days (with
distance of several months from each other)
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Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (2023) 60:521–547 523
In our solution, we employ streaming outlier detection without any need for labeled
data. Using such an approach is not new in vehicle PdM, as reported in Rögnvaldsson et al.
(2018), Byttner et al. (2011), and Fan et al. (2015). However, we differ in the manner we
employ proximity-based anomaly-detection1 , we devise a novel 2-stage solution, which is
shown to be particularly effective in certain cases and also, we build a fleet anomaly detec-
tion framework using a deep learning model. The latter is the superior technique in the
average case. In summary, the contribution of this work is threefold:
– We propose distance-based, hybrid and deep-learning context-aware methods to per-

form fleet PdM. To efficiently define the context, we may employ clustering and dimen-
sionality reduction. Also, we present how to properly fit a state-of-the-art deep learning
model in a fleet environment.
– We thoroughly evaluate our proposals against the state-of-the-art PdM solutions for VF
in Rögnvaldsson et al. (2018), Byttner et al. (2011), and Fan et al. (2015) in terms of
cost. We consider the cost and benefits of false and correct predictions, respectively,
since presenting accuracy results may be misleading and/or meaningless in PdM.
– Finally, we develop a novel benchmark fleet dataset based on an existing dataset used
for remaining useful time prediction. The complete implementation of the techniques
presented is freely available2 and the results presented hereby are reproducible to their
full extent.
The remainder of this work is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the related
work. The existing techniques along with our proposals are presented in Section 3. We
thoroughly evaluate the described techniques in a fleet management scenario, using a con-
structed fleet dataset based on an existing turbofan dataset in Section 4 and in a real bus
fleet dataset in Section 5. We conclude in Section 6.
2 Related work
Employing advanced data-analytics for PdM is an emerging topic and several techniques
have been proposed in the recent years. An overview of the data-driven PdM state-of-
the-art is presented in works such as Carvalho et al. (2019) and Kovalev et al. (2018),
where techniques for data preprocessing, feature selection, data storing, model building
and validation, fault detection and prediction, and estimation of remaining useful life are
described. However, it is important to notice that each application comes with its unique
characteristics that affect the corresponding design (Korvesis et al., 2018). According
to these survey reports, the most commonly employed techniques include Random For-
est, Neural Networks in several forms and architectures, Support Vector Machines, Hid-
den Markov Models, and clustering solutions, such as k-means. These are accompanied by
Fourier transformations, SARIMA models and techniques, such as PCA for dimensionality
reduction.
We differ in that we advocate an unsupervised learning approach, i.e., we do not rely
on any labeled data to train a model, as we perform (continuous) outlier detection. The
1
In this work, we use the terms outlier and anomaly, interchangeably, as is commonly done in the litera-
ture, e.g. in Boukerche et al. (2020).
2
https://github.com/agiannoul/UnsupervisedFleetManagment.
13
most similar work to ours, which also employs outlier detection in a PdM fleet manage-
ment scenario, has appeared in Rögnvaldsson et al. (2018), Byttner et al. (2011), and Fan
et al. (2015) with all the outlier detection techniques in that work being hybrid, combin-
ing statistical and proximity techniques, but relying mostly on statistical assumptions. Our
main difference is that we go beyond these proposals by leveraging pure distance-based
anomaly detection and recent deep learning models. Distance-based anomaly detection
has been also employed in an Industry 4.0 setting in Naskos et al. (2019) with a view to
detecting failures; here we employ similar techniques for PdM, i.e., for timely prediction of
failures before they actually occur. Furthermore, we implement a cluster-based technique
for streaming data based on Diez et al. (2016) and fit a state-of-the-art transformer model,
namely TranAD from Tuli et al. (2022), to fleet management.
PdM on top of continuous data PdM techniques based on data analytics can be distin-
guished according to the data they operate on. The majority of techniques process sensor
signals (Carvalho et al., 2019); however, there exist advanced methodologies that process
distinct event logs, e.g., Korvesis et al. (2018), Sipos et al. (2014), and Wang et al. (2017).
Our work falls into the former category with the clarification that we use aggregated val-
ues, although our techniques could be used also over raw data directly.
In both categories, data-driven techniques can be further separated in unsupervised,
semi-supervised, and supervised. Unsupervised models are preferred in dynamic environ-
ments and when there are no labels in the data. As far as the first category (sensor signals)
is concerned, the authors in Diez et al. (2016), Diez-Olivan et al. (2017), and Diez-Olivan
et al. (2018) try to model the normality using clustering algorithms or v-SVM. Specifically,
in Diez et al. (2016), the authors try to detect failures in bridge joints; regarding bridge
joints as a fleet renders this technique applicable to our setting.
In many cases, we know how normal data look like or can obtain a small labeled data-
set. In these cases, semi-supervised models may be used in order to take advantage of such
knowledge. In PdM, most semi-supervised models use the information of normal data
(without anomalies) to train a model; then, this model is applied to detect anomalies based
on the reconstruction error. State-of-the-art examples of this rationale are presented in
Audibert et al. (2020), Hundman et al. (2018), Meng et al. (2020), and Zhang et al. (2019),
where Autoencoders, LSTM, and Transformers are trained to reconstruct normal data and
detect anomalies. The combination of these models with adversarial and meta-learning
techniques has shown tremendous results in anomaly detection tasks (Audibert et al., 2020;
Tuli et al., 2022). Furthermore, in (Hundman et al., 2018; Meng et al., 2020), a dynamic
thresholding technique is presented in order to mitigate the difficulty in efficient tuning,
which is important, especially in streaming environments. Finally, in Zhang et al. (2019),
a Convolution LSTM-like network is used to detect anomalies through the reconstruction
of images derived from the data. In our work, we have selected the TranAD model in Tuli
et al. (2022), which can learn from small datasets and is time-efficient (fast training). We
fit TranAD in the fleet PdM case under investigation. To this end, we make extensions,
such as clustering before training, application of a sliding window to handle streams and
advanced thresholding.
PdM on top of discrete data With regards to the second category, i.e., event-based PdM,
the proposed techniques tend to use predefined event codes or artificial ones, extracted
from raw data, in order to detect a deviation in the data and predict anomalies. Manco et.
al predict failures in train doors using events from pre-installed software in Manco et al.
13
(2017). In (Filios et al., 2020), the authors try to predict the number of stoppages of a pack-
ing machine using ARIMA and Prophet algorithms. Extreme learning is used in Fink et al.
(2013) for the prediction of failure in trains in the near future. The ARMA algorithm is
used in Baptista et al. (2018) as a feature along with other thirteen statistical features and
PCA is performed before the event prediction process using KNN, RF, and SVM. In (Shafi
et al., 2018), a novel framework is proposed for failure prediction using Diagnostic Trouble
Codes (DTC) that are transmitted to the smartphone via bluetooth connections Another
supervised methodology is presented in Wang et al. (2018) using a graph with relations
among known anomaly sequences and sub-sequences of the data. Finally, the authors in
Naskos et al. (2019) use both supervised and unsupervised methods for event-based predic-
tive maintenance in a real industry case study, where a novel algorithm with Matrix Profile
(Yeh et al., 2016) was used to transform data into time series of events. There are similari-
ties between our techniques and event-based ones, such as the way the streaming data are
handled, but the proposed techniques are suitable for (aggregated) sensor signals.
PdM in vehicle fleets In this section, we narrow our focus on PdM in vehicles. Apart
from the works in Rögnvaldsson et al. (2018), Byttner et al. (2011), and Fan et al. (2015)
against which we directly compare, a survey about machine learning in predicting the need
of maintenance tasks in the automotive industry can be found in Shafi et al. (2018). In
(Derse et al., 2021), a solution based on handling missing values, applying PCA for fea-
ture selection and performing anomaly detection through isolation forest, particle swarm
optimization, and k-means clustering algorithms to detect electronic control unit (ECU)
system outliers is presented. The objective of this proposal is different than ours: in Derse
et al. (2021), the aim is to detect outliers in the ECU system, which can be due to an intru-
sion or fault in a sensor, where our analysis focuses on fault prediction regarding in-vehicle
equipment. In Chen et al. (2020), prediction of time-between-failures is performed. Data
are combined with GIS information so that contextual information like weather conditions
is used. The forecasting techniques employed are supervised, such as ANN, SVR, random
forest, and gcForest. This prediction refers to the time between failures, while, on the other
hand, we try to provide an effective way for live analysis and prediction of fault in each
vehicle of the fleet.
In (Massaro et al., 2020), the authors use supervised ANN and clustering techniques in
OBD II signals to perform driver style classification, which can be used for multiple pur-
poses, such as consulting and PdM. This case is similar to ours with the difference that we
use unsupervised methods instead of supervised ones. Also, the authors in Gardner et al.
(2020) deal with a 2400-vehicle fleet with access to two types of logs, one with informa-
tion for each vehicle and another one with maintenance details. They discover sequential
patterns in the multivariate maintenance data using tensor decomposition, employ LSTM
for PdM, and predict vehicle and fleet-level costs using an ARIMA time series model. With
regards to the PdM task, we differ in that we use sensor readings from the vehicle in order
to predict if maintenance is needed. The PdM techniques for vehicles are summarized in
Table 1, where, apart from the different goals mentioned above, we also highlight their
main limitations that render them inapplicable to our setting.
Streaming proximity‑based anomaly detection Finally, the state-of-the-art in streaming

anomaly (or outlier) detection is described in textbooks such as Aggarwal (2017) and sur-
veys, such as Boukerche et al. (2020). In this work, we build upon the proposal in Kontaki
et al. (2011) due to the reasons mentioned in Section 3. However, our approach can be
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Table 1 Predictive maintenance in vehicle fleets

Technique Method Data Goal Limitation
Derse et al. PCA, k-means, isolation sensor values detection of outliers in no context-awareness
(2021) forest, particle swarm the ECU system (intru-
optimization sion, fault in a sensor)
Chen et al. ANN, SVR, random sensor val- forecasting time- supervised
(2020) forest, and gcForest ues, GIS between-failures
Massaro et al. ANN, k-means sensor values driver style classification supervised
(2020) and PdM
Gardner et al. LSTM, ARIMA logged predict the probability event-based
(2020) events of future maintenance
jobs, forecasting main-
tenance cost
followed using any other existing exact distance-based outlier detection technique, such
as Cao et al. (2014), Kontaki et al. (2016), Cao et al. (2016), Cao et al. (2017), Zhao et al.
(2018), Yoon et al. (2019), and Tran et al. (2020) without changing the final results.
3 Unsupervised outlier detection techniques
Commonly, in PdM, we continuously monitor and process the condition metadata of the
equipment under examination and the goal is to detect anomalous behavior (deviations)
and system malfunctions with a view to proceeding to their timely treatment thus avoid-
ing any more severe damage. The monitoring data is collected in real-time and, as such,
is in the form of a data stream. In our case, we deal with fleet PdM. Instead of stand-alone
equipment, we have multiple components (e.g., buses) as a part of a VF. Fleet members
operate simultaneously and exhibit performance degradation over time. Moreover, the
dynamic environment in which they operate results in a twofold challenge regarding outlier
detection for PdM: firstly, to model the equipment behavior in such a way that extreme
values correspond to malfunctions, and secondly, the underlying technique to take into
account the context in which the equipment operates.
In this work, we investigate three existing approaches to perform outlier detection for
PdM in vehicle fleets:
1. Grand, which is a hybrid statistical and proximity-based technique (Rögnvaldsson

et al., 2018).
2. MCOD, a distance-based (proximity) technique (Kontaki et al., 2011).
3. A simple streaming extension of the clustering-based technique in Diez et al. (2016),
which considers each member of the fleet as a single cluster.
Our main novelty lies in that we propose two new methods that are shown to be more
effective:
1. A novel 2-stage algorithm, which adds a post-processing proximity check stage over the
Grand method.
13
2. A novel extension to the TranAD solution (Tuli et al., 2022) for vehicle fleets, where
the state-of-the-art deep learning solution of TranAD is endowed by context-awareness
and a more efficient thresholding technique (Yang et al., 2019).
The three existing approaches are also used to compare our proposals and are chosen
because (i) they are already applied in real-world industrial cases, (ii) they are unsupervised
and (iii) they can operate in a context-aware manner as explained in this section. Moreover,
Grand is the main approach accompanying the VF dataset used in the evaluation.
3.1 Problem formulation and main workflow
In fleet PdM, we have data that are produced from a fleet Fl of components (members):
Fl = {f1 , f2 , ..., fn }
where each fi represents the data from the ith member of the fleet and is a multivariate
time-series:
fi = {fi1 , fi2 , ..., fiT }
where each fit datapoint is collected from fi at a specific timestamp t and fit ∈ ℝm ∀ t.
Moreover each fi has a start of life fistart and end of life fiend , which can be different for each
component of the fleet. Our objective is to predict the wear (behavior degradation) of each
member fi before fi fails via outlier detection techniques.
All the examined techniques conform to the high-level workflow depicted in Fig. 2. For
all techniques, context-awareness is achieved through the definition of the Peer Group Pr,
as explained below, whereas the deep learning technique employs clustering as well.
3.2 Statistical and hybrid methods
In statistical techniques, the data model is in the form of a closed-form probability distribu-
tion, and the parameters of this model are learned according to the corresponding data. As
stated in Aggarwal (2017), “a major advantage of probabilistic models is that they can be
easily applied to virtually any data type (or mixed data type), as long as an appropriate
generative model is available for each mixture component.” However, this type of outlier
detection is known to suffer from several limitations, such as over-fitting, difficulty in inter-
pretation, especially in high dimensions, and the fact that sometimes, fitting the data to dis-
tribution is simply not appropriate (Aggarwal, 2017). Nevertheless, statistical-based meth-
ods have been proposed for fleet management (Rögnvaldsson et al., 2018; Byttner et al.,
2011; Fan et al., 2015) especially for the VF dataset considered in our work; therefore we
consider the corresponding techniques as our first competitor.
More specifically, we consider one variant of the so-called Consensus Self-Organizing
Models (COSMO) (Byttner et al., 2011) method. This method is based on the wisdom of
the crowd principle, where a group of similar equipment (i.e. a peer group) is used to deter-
mine normal behavior. The setting where the COSMO approach is applicable corresponds
to a population (fleet) of components with similar characteristics and functionalities. In
our case, this fleet of similar components is a fleet of vehicles, such as buses of a single
type. COSMO extracts several metadata from raw monitored data, such as mean, average,
correlation, and distributions values. The deviations are detected after the comparison of a
13
Fig. 2 High-level workflow
sample with the peer group and the testing of the null hypothesis. COSMO is not an out-
lier detection technique, but a state-of-the-art framework for fleet management. We focus
on the failure prediction part, which is done using an anomaly detection technique called
Group anomaly detection (Grand).
In simple terms, Grand computes the strangeness of a new sample in relation to a Peer
Group Pr, which captures the context. Then it derives the deviation level of the testing
component using the strangeness of the lasts samples in time. Grand3 comprises three parts
regarding PdM, namely (i) streaming data representation, (ii) identification of the reference
group, and (iii) detection of deviations. Regarding the first part, the Grand method can
use several representations such as daily histograms, raw sensor data, or any representa-
tion of the raw data like Auto-Encoders (Rögnvaldsson et al., 2018). In addition, regarding
the second part, in cases where there is no provided grouping of data sources, the peer
group Pr is calculated from historical data from the same source as the testing sample. In
such cases, the technique is referred to as Individual anomaly detection instead of Group
anomaly detection.
More precisely, in Individual anomaly detection, there are two user-defined options for
the construction of the Pr group, an inductive and a transductive one. In both, the Pr group
is constructed in a manner that it captures the normal operation, which implies that it is
necessary to have the capability to define what the normal system behavior is3. This is a
limitation addressed by Group anomaly detection, where the knowledge of normal system
behavior is not required. In Grand, the Pr group is constructed by fleet members that are
assumed to operate in a similar environment. An anomaly is detected when the monitored
data of a target member deviate in relation to the other members’ data.
3
https://github.com/caisr-hh/group-anomaly-detection.
13
In the Grand method, in order to detect deviations, we construct a distinct peer group
Pr for each fit using the last npr datapoints of all fj ∈ Fl members excluding datapoints
of fi, where npr is a parameter and can be expressed in the time domain (e.g., 15 days,
one month). To test if a sample fit deviates, we calculate the strangeness of a sample fit
(strng(fit )) in relation to the rest of samples in a homogeneous set Pr. For this purpose, a
non-conformity measure needs to be employed. Specifically, three non-conformity meas-
ures are considered to calculate strng(fit ): (i) Median, which is the distance of fit from the
median of Pr (i.e., its most central pattern), (ii) Knn, which is the average distance to the
k-nearest neighbors of fit within Pr, and (iii) Lof, which is the local outlier factor (Breunig
et al., 2000) of fit . In this way, the strangeness (strng(fit )) of the examined sample fit and
for all samples in the Pr are computed. After that, the p-value pt of the examined sample
fit is computed using Algorithm 1 from (Dai and Bouguelia, 2020). If the p-values are
uniformly distributed in [0,1], then the deviation level will be low; otherwise, it exhibits an
increasing behavior. This procedure is slow, so it can be used only with low frequency in a
real-time application, or with aggregated data like daily histograms as in our case (details
are in Section 5).
Algorithm 1 Algorithm of 2T along with standard deviation (Yang et al., 2019)
3.3 Our proposal for proximity‑based solutions
The rationale in proximity-based methods is to model outliers as points in a preferably

metric space that are isolated from the remaining data based on similarity or distance func-
tions (Aggarwal, 2017). To this end, three different techniques are usually used, namely
clustering, density-based, and nearest-neighbor methods. In clustering and density-based
methods, the outliers are points that are far away from dense regions. In the nearest-neigh-
bor methodology (commonly referred to as distance-based outlier detection), the outliers
are detected based on the number of their neighbors within an R distance or based on the
distance from the k-nearest neighbor (Knorr et al., 2000). An advantage of proximity-based
solutions is that they do not make any assumptions about the data distribution.
3.3.1 Distance‑based outlier detection (DOD) for streams
In our case, continuous distance-based outlier detection is deployed, where one of the
most widely used definitions for a distance-based outlier is adopted: an object fit is
marked as an outlier, if there are less than k objects in a distance at most R from fit ,
excluding fit itself (Knorr et al., 2000). Specifically, in this work where data is in form of
a stream, the Micro-cluster-based Continuous Outlier Detection (MCOD) method is used
(Kontaki et al., 2011); however, MCOD can be replaced by any other exact continuous
13
distance-based outlier method mentioned in Section 2. MCOD operates exclusively in

main-memory. It employs a sliding window to handle active objects of the data stream
and an event-based approach to handle expired data (i.e. data that no longer belong to
the window) and the newly arrived data. Also, MCOD uses micro-clusters to group data
with a view to decreasing the number of distance computations, which are expensive; this
aspect is important if real-time constraints are imposed.
Applying MCOD in our setting requires the specification of the window contents at each
slide and the distance function. In a nutshell, the main rationale is to process new data as they
arrive and compare new samples based on their distance from all existing samples in the current
window. The window, as already mentioned, is typically sliding in an overlapping manner (as
opposed to tumbling windows) and is common for all similar objects. If the segment of the bus
fleet examined comprises one type of bus, this corresponds to a single sliding window. We can
think of the window W as an alternative of Pr, with the difference that W contains datapoints
from all fleet members and is calculated in every slide, while Pr is calculated for every fleet
member. Such a distance-based outlier approach is characterized by the following configuration
parameters apart from R and k: (i) the distance function, where the Euclidean distance is used in
this work, (ii) the size of the window W, e.g., last 3 days or last 10000 measurements, and (iii)
the size of the slide, which defines how frequently outlier computation is performed, e.g., every
1 hour or every new 1000 points. The reason we have chosen MCOD is threefold: (i) as evi-
denced in a third-party evaluation, it is suitable for real-time applications (Tran et al., 2016); (ii)
it comes with flavors that can run several parameterizations concurrently (Kontaki et al., 2016),
and (iii) it can be deployed on massively parallel platforms when PdM needs to be approached
as a big data application (Toliopoulos et al., 2020). Furthermore, several open-source, freely
available implementations exist (Georgiadis et al., 2013; Tran et al., 2016; Toliopoulos et al.,
2020).
3.3.2 The 2‑stage solution
The 2-stage solution aims to combine the rationale of the Grand and distance-based outli-
ers methods. More specifically, to improve outlier detection results of the Grand method,
we have added a proximity-based post-processing check after the computation of the devia-
tion level. The idea is to use the proximity information of the sample in relation to the other
samples in Pr. The 2-stage technique uses three parameters: R, Tout, and Tin, which are lev-
eraged to assess (i) whether a deviation reported by the original Grand technique should be
indeed reported as an outlier and (ii) whether a normal sample according to Grand should
be reported as an outlier.
The main details are as follows. In the first stage, the Grand method is applied. In the
second stage, for every sample, we calculate nn, which is the number of samples in Pr that
are less than R distance far away. If the sample corresponds to a deviation and the percent-
age nn/|Pr| is larger than Tin, then we discard the initial decision and the sample is flagged
as an inlier. In this way, we aim to decrease the false positives that are reported. Similarly,
if the sample does not deviate and nn/|Pr| is smaller than Tout, we still report it as an outlier
with a view to increasing true positives by catching more outliers. This double-check takes
place to detect extreme cases, hence Tin takes relatively high values and Tout relatively low
values.4 In this way, we capture both seemingly deviating samples with many neighbors
and non-seemingly deviating samples with very few neighbors.
4
The 2-stage approach is expected to function differently than MCOD, because it looks for neighbors only
in the past samples, while MCOD continuously assesses all the window contents.
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3.4 Cluster‑based outlier detection in fleet streaming data
In (Diez et al., 2016), a cluster-based method to find failure indications in joints of bridges
is presented. We transfer this solution to our setting by treating joints as a fleet. This clus-
tering-based technique comprises three main operations: i) outlier removal and cluster cal-
culation, ii) computation of distance between clusters, and iii) deviation/outlier detection.
Each member of the fleet fi is seen as a different cluster. To form the clusters, we con-
sider only datapoints of each fi in a sliding time window, as in MCOD. The only difference
from MCOD is that W here is calculated for each time step. Essentially, as cluster fWi, we
consider the datapoints of fi, which belong to W, fWi = {fit ∣ t ∈ W}
For each fWi, we perform outlier detection and removal in a repetitive process. Specifi-
cally, we calculate the distance of each datapoint in fWi from the cluster mean. Then we
mark as an outlier each datapoint, whose distance is greater than the mean of all distances
plus the standard deviation of such distances multiplied by a factor. This factor is set to 2,
as proposed in the original paper (Diez et al., 2016). This process is stopped after a fixed
number of iterations or when the maximum of such distances exceeds a threshold. The lat-
ter threshold is the mean of such distances plus the standard deviation multiplied by 0.5,
using the distances of the first iteration. Finally, we pick the mean 𝜇W of the remaining
fi
datapoints in fWi as the representative point of the cluster. The rationale here is to clean the
data from outliers in order to catch datapoints that refer to the normal operation of each
member fi in W.
Regarding the second and third operations, to score each fi in W, we calculate the aver-
age distance of 𝜇W with the representative of all other members in W. Finally, to report
fi
anomalies we use the 2T standard deviation threshold algorithm presented in Yang et al.
(2019). Having a set of anomaly scores, the 2T algorithm calculates an initial threshold
based on all data, and after that, it recalculates the threshold using the scores which are
smaller than the previous threshold. This process can be performed multiple times, but as
the authors suggest, we perform the Algorithm 1 with two iterations.
3.5 TranAD for fleet PdM
After the big success of the transformers and the attention mechanism in Natural Language
Processing (NLP) (Vaswani et al., 2017), transformers have been used in several machine
learning tasks, such as forecasting and anomaly detection. TranAD (Deep Transformer
Networks for Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series Data) is a transformer model
proposed in Tuli et al. (2022) and seems to outperform the previous state-of-the-art deep
learning solutions for anomaly detection. A strong advantage of TranAD is that it can use a
small training set without result quality degradation. We use this model and try to fit it into
fleet predictive maintenance tasks.
The main procedure of applying TranAD for fleet PdM is shown in Algorithm 2. We
leverage the capability of easy training of TranAD with few epochs (5) and a relatively
small amount of training dataset (e.g. last 15 days of operation). Firstly, we apply a time-
shifted window W as in previous methods. For each fi in W, we compute a peer group Pr
similarly to the Grand method, which contains datapoints from all other members fj except
fi; Pr thus captures the appropriate context. The difference from the Grand method is that
in Grand, the Pr contents are computed for each fit , while in TranAD, they are computed
in every slide. We use the first half of Pr (in the time domain) to train a TranAD model to
reconstruct its input, and the second half to calculate an appropriate threshold. The latter
13
Algorithm 2 TranAD in fleets
part in training is a novel extensions of ours. Optionally, we can perform dimensionality

reduction on Pr, e.g., through PCA. We calculate the reconstruction error of a sample by
calculating the L1 distance between the sample and the output of the model. So, for all
datapoints of the second half of Pr, we compute the reconstruction error, which is used as
an anomaly score. Then, the 2T algorithm (see Algorithm 1) is used to calculate an appro-
priate threshold. Finally, we use the model to reconstruct the datapoints of fWi and report
an anomaly for each datapoint fit that has a reconstruction error higher than the threshold.
The rationale is to train a TranAD model in set of data that represents the normality in the
current specific context. Furthermore, the homogeneous set is also used to calculate the
threshold using normal data.
However, we have observed that often, the procedure above does not properly capture a
homogenous normality context. To ameliorate this problem, we proceed to the pre-process-
ing described next.
3.5.1 Clustering before training TranAD
To further improve the results of TranAD, we suggest a human-in-the-loop solution.

Specifically, we have observed that TranAD could not identify anomalies easily when
the training set comprises multiple well isolated clusters, e.g., there is a set of differ-
ent vehicle types, each one with distinct behavior. To provide experimental evidence
regarding this observation, we build three simple synthetic datasets of two-dimensional
data following the normal distribution. The first one contains two clusters, the second
contains three clusters and the third contains five clusters. Each dataset is split into
training and testing sets. The training set contains only normal data and the test set
contains data from the same distributions of training set plus some outliers points from
different distributions. In Fig. 3, we plot these artificial datasets. Then, for these syn-
thetic datasets, we compare the results when training using all clusters against training
13
Fig. 3 The training (top) and test (bottom) set for each of the three synthetic datasets
a different TranAD model for each group, after we apply clustering in data points. For
the latter case, we apply clustering only in the training data. To detect outliers in the
testing set, for each data point, we detect the closest cluster and use the corresponding
TranAD model to calculate the reconstruction error. For the first case, where a com-
mon TranAD model is used, the reconstruction error in the test set for all three datasets
is shown in Fig. 4. The computed error of the outliers is on the rightmost part in red
separated by a dotted line. As the number of outliers grows, a significant portion of
outliers, up to one third, is not detected because their reconstruction error is similar to
the error of normal points. On the other hand, in the second case, where we train Tra-
nAD models per cluster, the reconstruction error of outliers is well distinguished from
normal data, as shown in Fig. 5.
In summary, we suggest running a hierarchical clustering algorithm first to
detect the numbers of the clusters in data. As soon as the number of clusters cn is
defined, instead of using the whole Pr as described above, we employ clustering in Pr
Fig. 4 Reconstruction error when no clustering is applied
13
Fig. 5 Reconstruction error when clustering is applied
datapoints using cn clusters. Then, we train cn models with the same process as before,
with the only difference that each model uses datapoints of the corresponding cluster
instead of the whole Pr. Finally, to produce the reconstruction error of f i, we assign
each datapoint fit to its closer cluster and use the corresponding model to calculate the
reconstruction error. This improves the results of TranAD in complex datasets because
TranAD can easier learn to reconstruct the data of a single cluster. Apparently, this
adds a time overhead, e.g., at the order of several minutes, which is acceptable because
of the low frequency of our data updates (e.g., a couple of times per day).
3.6 Complexity
In this work, data are already aggregated thus we have relatively low frequency of data
samples, therefore, we do not emphasize a lot on real-time response issues. However, all
techniques have time and space complexity at most O(n2), where n is the number of points
in Pr or in W. If TranAD employs hierarchical clustering its time complexity increases to
cubic though. TranAD is also at most cubic in the number of dimensions when it employs
PCA. Details are omitted due to space constraints.
4 Creating a benchmark dataset from NASA C‑Maps
The Turbofan Engine Degradation Simulation Data Set includes run-to-failure simulated
data from turbofan jet engines. Engine degradation simulation was carried out using
C-MAPSS (Saxena and Goebel, 2008). Four different degradation sets were simulated
under different combinations of operational conditions and fault modes. This dataset is
widely used to predict the remaining useful life (RUL). The C-Maps dataset provides four
13
sets of turbofan simulations, termed f001,f002,f003 and f004, where each set contains sev-
eral run-to-failure examples operated under similar conditions. The time instance in these
examples are cycles and for each cycle, we have a vector of three settings and twenty-
one sensor values. We use the training set to build a benchmarking dataset, which we
make available. The strongest point of this procedure is that the dataset is accompanied
by ground truth, which is extremely difficult to acquire in practice. The end of life of each
turbofan is treated as a fault to be predicted. In our experiments, we use multiple values of
prediction horizons (PHs) to evaluate the PdM methods. An alert is considered a true posi-
tive if it is inside the prediction horizon, which defines the period before the fault in which
the prediction should be made. Alerts should not be raised too early or too late.
4.1 Building an artificial vehicle fleet PdM dataset
We consider each of the four sets as a fleet of turbofan engines because they operate in
similar conditions. Knowing that each example starts from a normal condition and starts
deviating at some point until its end of life, we can construct a realistic fleet dataset. In
real-life fleet cases, there is a sufficient amount of data considered normal and a small
proportion of data deviating each time. So, we first need to apply some pre-processing
to the original dataset. A description of such pre-processing for each set of similar tur-
bofans is presented below for fully reproducibility reasons. It is important to mention
that this pre-processing does not benefit by default any of the methods we test for two
reasons. Firstly, our assumption that a proportion (e.g., two thirds) of operating fleet
members is running in relatively normal condition is not an overestimation of a real-
world behavior in vehicle fleets. E.g., in Rögnvaldsson et al. (2018), it is mentioned that
downtime of buses is 11% of their whole lifetime. Secondly, we do not use any knowl-
edge about the starting time of wear in turbofans, which is unknown to us; we use only
the information about their end of life.
When constructing the benchmark, we aim to ensure that, at each time point, at
least 23 of the fleet operates in a relatively healthy condition. We name this parameter
as Minimum Good Proportion Reference (MGPR). We start the dataset building pro-
cess by sorting each set of examples (f001,f002,f003,f004) by the end of the life cycle
of each turbofan operation. Each turbofan is assigned an id equal to its position in the
sorted list. We refer to a run-to-failure example of a turbofan as ti, where ti is a time
series and i is the id of the example. Initially, each ti has start of life cycle ti.start set
equal to 1 and ti.end to the cycle at the end of its life. We aim to shift ti in the time
domain to simulate the behavior of a fleet, where some members fail and others start
operating over time. At the same time, we want to ensure that MGPR is fulfilled for
as many examples as possible. To attain this, we group examples into bins that we
may shift in the time axis later. Using predefined step values, we split the set into
step bins. Using an iterative process, we assign each ti into a bin. The jth bin contains
all ti examples for which i mod step = j. For example, in the f001 set, which has car-
dinality of 100, setting the step equal to 4 yields 4 bins with 25 examples each. Due
to the manner bins are populated, the end of life of each ti in each bin is as far away
as possible from the end of life of the remaining examples in the same bin. Next, we
provide some definitions, which help us define how to shift the bins and construct
the Pr sets in a meaningful manner.
13
Definition 1 (good example) ti is considered a good example for tj, if ti starts before the
end of life of tj and ti’s end of life is at least mindist time units (cycles) after the tj’s end of
life, i.e., ti.end − tj.end > mindist (mindist is a constant value set to 60).
Definition 2 (bad example) ti is considered a bad example for tj, if it starts before the
end of life of tj and ti’s end of life is not at least mindist time units apart from tj’s end of life
(|tj.end − ti.end| < mindist ).
Definition 3 (Good Proportion Reference (GPR)) The GPR of each ti is calculated using
the formula |good|/(|good| + |bad|).
Definition 4 (Example Validity) The MGPR is the minimum GPR value that an instance
ti must have to be considered valid for analysis. This is set to 23 in our case.
Starting from the first constructed bin Bbin, we use the instances of the other bins Rbins
= ti∉Bbin to improve the GPR of each ti ∈ Bbin through the Algorithm 3. Initially, all
instances ti have their start of life values set to cycle 1. To improve an instance ti in Bbin,
we shift the instances from Rbins in order the end of life of ti ∈ Bbin to overlap with a
healthy state of ti ∈ Rbins. In other words, we shift instances from Rbins to ensure that as
many as possible instances from Bbin meet the MGPR threshold.
After the application of Algorithm 3, we end up with a set of run-to-failure examples
shifted in time. We will test our techniques for all valid examples, i.e., examples with GPR
> MGPR. Finally, to use the constructed dataset, we map the cycles in artificial times-
tamps. One cycle is translated to one day of operation. As a starting point, we select the
January 1, 2000 (dates here are used just as a label and do not impact on the results). In this
way, we place each ti in the time domain simulating a real fleet usage in time, where equip-
ment starts and stops operating uniformly in time. By analyzing only the samples with a
GPR above 23 , we assume that at least two-thirds of the equipment is in a normal state as
explained already. Having potentially abnormal points mixed with normal ones captures
real-world scenarios more realistically. In Figs. 6 and 7, we plot a line for each ti in the final
Algorithm 3 Fleet dataset cnstruction
13
Fig. 6 Samples of f001 set with

time shift, after the procedure
for building fleet dataset. X-axis
refers to cycles and y-axis to
the id of each turbofun run. The
episodes with black lines are
those with GRP above MGPR,
while those with red lines are
used only in peer groups but not
for analysis
set, starting from ti.start and ending to ti.end to show how the run-to-failures examples are
shifted in time to produce the final fleet dataset.
4.2 Evaluation based on maintenance costs and benefits
In order to evaluate our models, we use a cost-based approach, where we assign a cost for
each prediction of the model. The idea is to transfer the results of the model to real-life
metrics. First, we count one false positive (FP) whenever an alarm is raised, i.e., an anom-
aly is detected, before the PH or very close to the end of life of a component; in our exam-
ples, this buffer period is constant to 2 days. We count one true positive (TP) if at least one
alarm is raised within the PH. We assume that an alarm in PH could lead to the prevention
of failure (i.e. the expert could verify that something is wrong). It holds that false negatives
FN= 1-TP. We assign the cost of FP as 1, because an aimless check was made and/or we
stop the component operation while it has at least PH of remaining life. We assign the cost
of FN as a multiple α of the cost of FP, where α ranges from 5 to 100, because a failure
Fig. 7 Samples of f002 set with

time shift, after the procedure
for building fleet dataset. X-axis
refers to cycles and y-axis to
the id of each turbofun run. The
episodes with black lines are
those with GRP above MGPR,
while those with red lines are
used only in peer groups but not
for analysis
13
may be catastrophic depending on the case. Finally, we assign the cost of TP as 1, which
is the cost of maintenance of a deviating component. Lastly, for true negatives TN there is
no cost. To evaluate our methods, we calculate the FP, TP, FN, TN for each component in
the fleet, and we sum them, and then we derive the cost according to the assignments men-
tioned above. The parameter configurations are provided in the repository. The research
question we aim to answer is: do our proposals yield lower maintenance costs than existing
techniques?
4.2.1 F001 fleet set
In the first dataset, TranAD performs better than all other methods, achieving the low-
est cost. We can notice from Fig. 8 that the cost for TranAD is constant for all dif-
ferent FN costs, which is due to zero False Negatives. In other words, TranAD can
detect all failures in time regardless of the different lengths of the PH. It is important
to mention that TranAD manages to achieve these costs using a single parameteriza-
tion, whereas for the other techniques, several configurations are tested and we pre-
sent the best performing ones; these details are provided along with the datasets in the
publicly available code repository. As far as the other methods are concerned, Grand,
DOD and 2-stage have similar costs. The second lowest cost is achieved by the 2-stage
method. The results about which method performs better are the same for all different
PHs, where Clusterjoint has a similar cost with other methods for low FN cost but has
a much higher total cost for a high FN cost; this is due to the number of false negatives
that it reports.
Fig. 8 Minimum Cost that each

method achieves for different PH
and FN cost values for f001
13

method achieves for different PH
and FN cost values for f003
4.2.2 F003 fleet set
We expect to observe similar results to the f001 set, because we know that f001 and f003
refer to the same kind of fault (Saxena and Goebel, 2008). Indeed, TranAD reports have the
lowest cost in general than other methods as shown in Fig. 9. Again, the second smallest
cost is produced by the 2-stage method, which is better in TrandAD for high FN cost and
larger PH. In this setting, distance-based outlier detection (DOD) also performs particu-
larly efficiently.
4.2.3 F002 and F004 fleet sets
The f002 and f004 datasets contain about 250 and 225 components, respectively. Here, the ini-
tial approach of TranAD was unable to perform and hardly made reports. We have a situation
where the training set consists of data from multiple well-separated clusters while previously
there was a single cluster (see Fig. 10). To handle this, we use the pre-processing clustering
discussed in Section 3.5. More specifically, we plot the Pr data points for each window in our
TranAD process. To do so, we perform a PCA with two components in Pr. The plotted data
depict six separated clusters for f002 and f004 in Fig. 11. For f001 and f003, the corresponding
plots depict a single cluster (see Fig. 10). We also apply hierarchical clustering for each time
window. In Fig. 12 and 13, the dendrogram of hierarchical clustering for a specific window
is shown. We can observe that, for f001, the data are considered as part of one cluster for dis-
tance near 250, while for f004, for the same distance, we identify six different clusters.
After applying the above process for TranAD, we can observe the minimum cost pro-
duced by each method for f002 in Fig. 14 and for f004 in Fig. 15. For f002, we can observe
13
Fig. 10 Homogeneous Reference data of f001. The plots are ordered in time domain (begin of life of a com-
ponent on the left, end of life on the right)
Fig. 11 Six separated clusters in reference data of f002. dataset. The plots are ordered in time domain
(begin of life of a component on the left, end of life on the right)
that TranAD is better than all other methods except for FN cost equal to 100, where the
2-stage method performs equally well or better. In the f004 dataset, 2-stage results in lower
cost from TranAD as the cost of FN increases. Table 2 presents the relative performance of
the two best-performing techniques, namely TranAD and 2-stage. TranAD is superior apart
from case where there are multiple clusters in the fleet dataset and FN cost is high.
5 Bus fleet case‑study
This case study concerns a fleet of 19 buses used in a town on the west coast of Sweden.
All information about the data presented here is taken from the work in Rögnvaldsson et al.
(2018). The buses are on service contracts offered by the original equipment manufacturer
Fig. 12 Hierarchical agglomerative clustering using the ward linkage criterion for the f001 dataset
13
Fig. 13 Hierarchical agglomerative clustering using the ward linkage criterion for the f004 dataset
and repairs are made either in a manufacturer’s garage or on the road with additional cost.
The manufacturer’s workshop is 1 hour far away from the bus operator. Hence a sub-con-
tractor repair shop is sometimes used for maintenance to save time. A critical KPI (key
performance indicator) is the time a bus is not available due to maintenance or repair. To
avoid disruptions in service due to unavailable vehicles, the typical solution is to use spare
buses. The target is the time a bus is unavailable to be up to 5% of the total operating time.
If this is achieved, the operator can use just a single spare bus for every 20 operating buses.
The data collected refer to a period of 4 years (2011-2015), during which it was observed
that the buses spent on average 11% of the operating time in repairs and maintenance. The
buses visited about 11 times a year the workshop, a number which is twice the number of
scheduled visits. The time duration a bus was at the workshop is, on average, 4 days, and
much of this time is due to waiting for other buses to be repaired. Thus the capability to
predict failures in time is a powerful tool for enhanced maintenance planning of the buses
and damage replacement, avoiding many of the above delays.
In this context, the data we have access to are related to the air pressure signal (Wet
Tank Air Pressure). This signal is the only one associated with the components of the air
compressor, which was very problematic according to the bus service logs. The dataset5
contains the aggregated results in the form of histograms, and more specifically, for each
bus, there is at most a single sample per day, which is normalized and contains 50 histo-
gram bins. Each such bin is a different dimension, i.e., we need to process a 50-dimen-
sional dataset. The faults concerning the air compressor are categorized as follows: (1)
faults in the compressor that led to the need for the replacement of the component during
the operation of the bus, (2) damage to the compressor leading to its replacement in the
workshop, and (3) other damages related to the suspensions and the brakes. The most seri-
ous failures are these of the first two categories. The information about the dates on which
these faults occurred is obtained from Figure 7 of the work in Rögnvaldsson et al. (2018)6.
5
taken from https://github.com/caisr-hh/groupanomaly-detection/tree/master/grand/datasets/data/vehicles.
6
Regarding the exact time period during which the failures occurred, there may be a deviation of a few
days, but this deviation does not affect the overall results due to the time granularity of the case study.
13

methods succeed for different PH
and FN cost for f002 dataset. For
each different PH and FN cost
methods are used with different
parameters

methods succeed for different PH
and FN cost f004 dataset. For
each different PH and FN cost
methods are used with different
parameters
13
Table 2 2-stage and TranAD relative costs for all datasets

PH = 15 PH = 23 PH = 30
Dataset FN cost 2-stage TranAD 2-stage TranAD 2-stage TranAD
f001 5 89 52 57 28 44 22
10 94 52 62 28 49 22
30 114 52 82 28 69 22
50 134 52 102 28 74 22
100 143 52 103 28 74 22
f002 5 258 169 189 95 146 63
10 268 184 199 110 156 78
30 308 244 239 170 196 138
50 348 304 279 230 236 198
100 448 454 379 380 250 348
f003 5 102 55 86 31 76 31
10 125 72 101 46 91 46
30 185 132 161 106 151 106
50 245 192 221 166 203 166
100 353 342 296 316 253 316
f004 5 256 229 199 173 160 151
10 330 289 264 233 225 211
30 523 498 407 402 324 352
50 563 638 447 542 364 478
100 661 802 516 636 404 528
The lowest cost is in bold
In the evaluation, we consider 12 out of 19 buses, for which we have failures, where towing
of the bus was needed; more specifically, we considered buses with numbers 369, 370, 371,
372, 373, 376, 377, 378, 380, 381, 382 and 383.
5.1 Bus experimental setting
We separate outliers into three classes: (i) class A outliers, which concern the most serious
failures, because of the need for towing the bus; (ii) class B outliers, which refer to com-
pressor replacement in the workshop; and (iii) class C outliers for the less serious failures,
which are repairs related to the air suspension and brakes. As in Fan et al. (2015) and in
the previous section, we will use a PH (prediction horizon) tolerance period for the predic-
tion of faults. More specifically, a reported outlier is counted as a correct warning about
a forthcoming failure, when this failure takes place in a PH period before the failure. For
these experiments, the PH is set to 15, 23, and 30 days, as in the benchmarking experi-
ments. An important notice is that, after a replacement of the compressor component in the
fleet of buses takes place, it is expected this component to exhibit deviations in its behav-
ior just because the component is a new one. To account for this fact and focus solely on
PdM rather than outlier detection in general, such false detection incidents that are reported
within PH time after the replacement of the component are ignored. We assign a differ-
ent cost for each class of failures. The class A outliers are the most expensive ones, so we
assign ten times higher costs than the class C outliers. Class B outliers are cheaper than the
13
Fig. 16 Final cost achieved by

each method for all 12 target
buses
ones in class A, due to no need for towing but they are still expensive. So we assign a cost
five times higher than class C. The class C is considered as less expensive repairs, so we
assign them a cost equal to 2,3,4 or 5. False alarms are assigned a cost equal to 1.
5.2 Results
We use several hyper-parameters for each method and keep the lowest cost for each dif-
ferent PH and maintenance score as previously (see Fig. 16). The Grand and Clusterjoint
methods could not produce lower cost than a dummy method that never raises alarms.
DOD achieves good results and can be used to decrease the cost of maintenance in such
a scenario. As in the previous set of experiments, 2-stage and TranAD achieve the lowest
cost. Based on the uncertainty of the ground truth, we can assume that both of these meth-
ods achieve the best results. 2-stage managed to successfully prune Grand method’s false
positives and keep most of the correct alarms of Grand. Also, it managed to raise an alarm
when the deviation level near a class A outlier was near zero (bus 378 July of 2013). Tra-
nAD’s efficient behavior is largely attributed to the dimensionality reduction through using
PCA and keeping 10 features (see Algorithm 2); otherwise, its cost would be much higher.
6 Conclusions
We present a predictive maintenance (PdM) context-aware solution for vehicle fleet man-
agement using unsupervised techniques to deal with the dynamic environment, in which
fleet members operate. To this end, we use a reference group to process the fleet’s mem-
bers, which mostly contains vehicle data in the same context without faults since we
assume that only a small portion of fleet members experience failures at each specific time
point. We examine a novel hybrid proximity-based solution. Moreover, we show how the
state-of-the-art deep learning anomaly detection method called TranAD can be used to
13
handle fleet streaming data. Rendering the deep learning techniques context-aware is not
trivial and, in our case, we resort to hierarchical clustering, while dimensionality reduction
is also important. The evaluation targets lowering maintenance cost to better reflect real-
world situations. Last but not least, we develop and make available a benchmark dataset
for evaluating PdM solutions in vehicle fleets; this dataset is based on an existing PdM
dataset for turbofan engines. Our two novel suggestions, i.e., the proximity-based 2-stage
technique and the adaptation of TranAD to vehicle fleets, are shown to outperform existing
solutions in our experiments. In the future, we intend to investigate automated fine-tuning
solutions that are more sophisticated than the 2T technique already employed and to judi-
ciously combine the results of multiple predictors to form an advanced ensemble solution.
Acknowledgements Not Applicable
Author contributions Both authors actively contributed to the research and the writing. The implementation
was conducted by the 1st author
Funding Open access funding provided by HEAL-Link Greece
Data availability https://github.com/agiannoul/UnsupervisedFleetManagment and https://github.com/caisr-

hh/groupanomaly-detection/tree/master/grand/datasets/data/vehicles
Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate Not Applicable
Consent for Publication Not Applicable
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Com-
mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article
are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the
material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly
from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (2023) 60:521–547

A context‑aware unsupervised predictive maintenance

Apostolos Giannoulidis1 · Anastasios Gounaris1

Received: 26 May 2022 / Revised: 29 August 2022 / Accepted: 31 August 2022 /

Keywords Predictive maintenance · Anomaly detection · Outlier detection · Vehicle fleet

Proper maintenance of the industrial equipment is important and, traditionally, mainte-

– We propose distance-based, hybrid and deep-learning context-aware methods to per-

Streaming proximity‑based anomaly detection Finally, the state-of-the-art in streaming

Table 1 Predictive maintenance in vehicle fleets

3 Unsupervised outlier detection techniques

1. Grand, which is a hybrid statistical and proximity-based technique (Rögnvaldsson

3.1 Problem formulation and main workflow

fi = {fi1 , fi2 , ..., fiT }

3.2 Statistical and hybrid methods

Fig. 2 High-level workflow

Algorithm 1 Algorithm of 2T along with standard deviation (Yang et al., 2019)

3.3 Our proposal for proximity‑based solutions

The rationale in proximity-based methods is to model outliers as points in a preferably

3.3.1 Distance‑based outlier detection (DOD) for streams

distance-based outlier method mentioned in Section 2. MCOD operates exclusively in

3.3.2 The 2‑stage solution

3.4 Cluster‑based outlier detection in fleet streaming data

3.5 TranAD for fleet PdM

Algorithm 2 TranAD in fleets

part in training is a novel extensions of ours. Optionally, we can perform dimensionality

3.5.1 Clustering before training TranAD

To further improve the results of TranAD, we suggest a human-in-the-loop solution.

Fig. 4 Reconstruction error when no clustering is applied

Fig. 5 Reconstruction error when clustering is applied

4 Creating a benchmark dataset from NASA C‑Maps

4.1 Building an artificial vehicle fleet PdM dataset

Algorithm 3 Fleet dataset cnstruction

Fig. 6 Samples of f001 set with

4.2 Evaluation based on maintenance costs and benefits

Fig. 7 Samples of f002 set with

4.2.1 F001 fleet set

Fig. 8 Minimum Cost that each

Fig. 9 Minimum Cost that each

4.2.2 F003 fleet set

4.2.3 F002 and F004 fleet sets

5 Bus fleet case‑study

Fig. 14 Minimum Cost that each

Fig. 15 Minimum Cost that each

Table 2 2-stage and TranAD relative costs for all datasets

The lowest cost is in bold

5.1 Bus experimental setting

Fig. 16 Final cost achieved by

Acknowledgements Not Applicable

Funding Open access funding provided by HEAL-Link Greece

Data availability https://​github.​com/​agian​noul/​Unsup​ervis​edFle​etMan​agment and https://​github.​com/​caisr-​

Consent for Publication Not Applicable

Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.

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3 Unsupervised outlier detection techniques

3.1 Problem formulation and main workflow

3.2 Statistical and hybrid methods

3.3 Our proposal for proximity‑based solutions

3.3.1 Distance‑based outlier detection (DOD) for streams

3.3.2 The 2‑stage solution

3.4 Cluster‑based outlier detection in fleet streaming data

3.5 TranAD for fleet PdM

3.5.1 Clustering before training TranAD

4 Creating a benchmark dataset from NASA C‑Maps

4.1 Building an artificial vehicle fleet PdM dataset

4.2 Evaluation based on maintenance costs and benefits

4.2.1 F001 fleet set

4.2.2 F003 fleet set

4.2.3 F002 and F004 fleet sets

5 Bus fleet case‑study

5.1 Bus experimental setting

Data availability https://github.com/agiannoul/UnsupervisedFleetManagment and https://github.com/caisr-