Semantic Rule-Based Equipment Diagnostic

Motivation. Diagnostic systems play an important role in industry since they help to maximise equipment’s up-time and minimise its maintenance and operating costs [16]. In the energy sector companies like Siemens often rely on rule-based diagnostics to analyse power generating equipment by, e.g., testing newly deployed electricity generating gas turbines [11], or checking vibration instrumentation [13], performance degradation [14], and faults in operating turbines. For this purpose diagnostic engineers create and use complex diagnostic rule-sets to detect equipment abnormalities. An important class of rules that are commonly used in Siemens are signal processing rules (SPRs) that allow one (i) filter, aggregate, combine, and compare signals1 coming from sensors installed in equipment and (ii) send notification messages when a certain pattern in signals is detected. Authoring SPR based rule-sets is challenging. We now discuss this challenge in details and then present our solution to address them.