Predictive maintenance based on event-log analysis: A case study

Abstract

Predictive maintenance techniques are designed to help anticipate equipment failures to allow for advance scheduling of corrective maintenance, thereby preventing unexpected equipment downtime, improving service quality for customers, and also reducing the additional cost caused by over-maintenance in preventative maintenance policies. Many types of equipment - e.g., automated teller machines (ATMs), information technology equipment, medical devices, etc. - track run-time status by generating system messages, error events, and log files, which can be used to predict impending failures. Aiming at these types of equipment, we present a general classification-based failure prediction method. In our parameterized model, we systematically defined four categories of features to try to cover all possibly useful features, and then used feature selection to identify the most important features for model construction. The general solution is sufficiently flexible and complex to address failure prediction for target equipment types. We chose ATMs as the example equipment and used real ATM run-time event logs and maintenance records as experimental data to evaluate our method on the feasibility and effectiveness. In this paper, we also share insights on how to optimize the model parameters, select the most effective features, and tune classifiers to build a high-performance prediction model.