Semantic Rule-Based Equipment Diagnostics

Industrial rule-based diagnostic systems are often data-dependant in the sense that they rely on specific characteristics of individual pieces of equipment. This dependence poses significant challenges in rule authoring, reuse, and maintenance by engineers. In this work we address these problems by relying on Ontology-Based Data Access: we use ontologies to mediate the equipment and the rules. We propose a semantic rule language, sigRL, where sensor signals are first class citizens. Our language offers a balance of expressive power, usability, and efficiency: it captures most of Siemens data-driven diagnostic rules, significantly simplifies authoring of diagnostic tasks, and allows to efficiently rewrite semantic rules from ontologies to data and execute over data. We implemented our approach in a semantic diagnostic system, deployed it in Siemens, and conducted experiments to demonstrate both usability and efficiency.