Online Failure Prevention from Connected Heating Systems

Many water boiler manufacturers are not able to detect the occurrence of failures in the machines they produce before they can pose inconvenience and sometimes danger for costumers and workers. Moreover, the number of boilers that have to be monitored, are many times in the range of the thousands or even millions, proportionaly to the number of costumers a company possesses. The detection of these failures in real time, would provide a significant improvement to the perception that consumers have of a certain company, since, if these failures occur, maintenance services can be deployed almost as soon as a failure happens. In this paper, an application prototype capable of monitoring and preventing failures in domestic water boilers, on the fly, is presented. This application evaluates measurements which are performed by sensors within the boilers, and identifies the ones that greatly differ from those received previously, as new data arrives, detecting tendencies which might illustrate the occurrence of a failure. The incremental local outlier factor is used with an approach based on the interquatile range measure to detect the outlier factors that should be analysed.