Fault-Detection Tool Has Companies ‘Mining’ Own Business

About this technology

Overview

Since 1981, SSME faults have caused 23 scrubbed launches and 29 percent of total Space Shuttle downtime, according to a compilation of analysis reports. The most serious cases typically occur in the last few seconds before ignition; a launch scrub that late in the countdown usually means a period of investigation of a month or more. In 2002, NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the Florida Institute of Technology, and Interface & Control Systems, Inc., worked together to attack this problem by creating a system that could automate the detection of mechanical failures in the SSMEs' fuel control valves. Indialantic, Florida-based Interface & Control Systems was awarded a Kennedy Space Center Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contract to develop a failure-detection system called SensorMiner. SensorMiner is a time-series data-mining tool that uses past performance data to build human-readable models for real-time fault detection. The system learns" from the past performance data develops a "signature" for nominal operation and automatically generates a fault-monitoring system. Conventional technology has made this process both a labor-intensive and error-prone task that is often misunderstood even by experts according to Interface & Control Systems. SensorMiner on the contrary will automatically correlate seemingly unrelated data and provide rich graphical feedback to the user. The company is introducing the commercially available data-mining tool to existing control system and test set markets that require advanced real-time anomaly detection and analysis systems."