Multiscale Machine Learning and Numerical Investigation of Ageing in Infrastructures

Infrastructure is a critical component of a country’s economic growth. Interaction with extreme service environments can adversely affect the long-term performance of infrastructure and accelerate ageing. This research focuses on using machine learning to improve the efficiency of analysing the multiscale ageing impact on infrastructure. First, a data-driven campaign is developed to analyse the condition of an ageing infrastructure. A machine learning-based framework is proposed to predict the state of various assets across a railway system. The ageing of the bond in fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP)-strengthened concrete elements is investigated using machine learning. Different machine learning models are developed to characterise the long-term performance of the bond. The environmental ageing of composite materials is investigated by a micromechanics-based machine learning model. A mathematical framework is developed to automatically generate microstructures. The microstructures are analysed by the finite element (FE) method. The generated data is used to develop a machine learning model to study the degradation of the transverse performance of composites under humid conditions. Finally, a multiscale FE and machine learning framework is developed to expand the understanding of composite material ageing. A moisture diffusion analysis is performed to simulate the water uptake of composites under water immersion conditions. The results are downscaled to obtain micromodel stress fields. Numerical homogenisation is used to obtain the composite transverse behaviour. A machine learning model is developed based on the multiscale simulation results to model the ageing process of composites under water immersion. The frameworks developed in this thesis demonstrate how machine learning improves the analysis of ageing across multiple scales of infrastructure. The resulting understanding can help develop more efficient strategies for the rehabilitation of ageing infrastructure

Learning from accidents : machine learning for safety at railway stations

In railway systems, station safety is a critical aspect of the overall structure, and yet, accidents at stations still occur. It is time to learn from these errors and improve conventional methods by utilizing the latest technology, such as machine learning (ML), to analyse accidents and enhance safety systems. ML has been employed in many fields, including engineering systems, and it interacts with us throughout our daily lives. Thus, we must consider the available technology in general and ML in particular in the context of safety in the railway industry. This paper explores the employment of the decision tree (DT) method in safety classification and the analysis of accidents at railway stations to predict the traits of passengers affected by accidents. The critical contribution of this study is the presentation of ML and an explanation of how this technique is applied for ensuring safety, utilizing automated processes, and gaining benefits from this powerful technology. To apply and explore this method, a case study has been selected that focuses on the fatalities caused by accidents at railway stations. An analysis of some of these fatal accidents as reported by the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) is performed and presented in this paper to provide a broader summary of the application of supervised ML for improving safety at railway stations. Finally, this research shows the vast potential of the innovative application of ML in safety analysis for the railway industry

Escape from Cells: Deep Kd-Networks for the Recognition of 3D Point Cloud Models

We present a new deep learning architecture (called Kd-network) that is designed for 3D model recognition tasks and works with unstructured point clouds. The new architecture performs multiplicative transformations and share parameters of these transformations according to the subdivisions of the point clouds imposed onto them by Kd-trees. Unlike the currently dominant convolutional architectures that usually require rasterization on uniform two-dimensional or three-dimensional grids, Kd-networks do not rely on such grids in any way and therefore avoid poor scaling behaviour. In a series of experiments with popular shape recognition benchmarks, Kd-networks demonstrate competitive performance in a number of shape recognition tasks such as shape classification, shape retrieval and shape part segmentation.Comment: Spotlight at ICCV'1

Advances in fault diagnosis for high-speed railway: A review

The high speed railway (HSR) is a complex system with many subsystems and components. The reliability of its core subsystems is a key consideration in ensuring the safety and operation efficiency of the whole system. As the service time increases, the degradation of these subsystems and components may lead to a range of faults and deteriorate the whole system performance. To ensure the operation safety and to develop reasonable maintenance strategies, fault detection and isolation is an indispensable functionality in high speed railway systems. In this paper, the traction power supply system, bogie system, civil infrastructure system, and control and signaling system of HSR are briefly summarized, and then different fault diagnosis methods for these subsystems are comprehensively reviewed. Finally, some future research topics are discussed

Data driven machine learning prognostics of buckling failure modes in ballasted railway track

This study explores the development and application of a machine learning (ML) approach to predict buckling failure modes in ballasted railway tracks. With the growing demand for safer and more reliable railway systems, the ability to foresee and mitigate track failures is of paramount importance. Our study focuses on harnessing advanced ML algorithms to analyse and interpret complex data sets, aiming to identify potential buckling failures before they occur. The methodology employed involves collecting extensive data from previous advanced numerical studies. Faced with the inadequacy of field data collection on track buckling and the limited availability of data related to track conditions, our study has relied on simulation data for insight and analysis. This data is then processed and analysed using sophisticated ML models, trained to recognise patterns and anomalies indicative of potential buckling failures. A novel aspect of our approach is the integration of environmental factors, acknowledging their significant influence on the likelihood of both snap-through and progressive buckling in railway tracks. We compare the effectiveness of various ML algorithms in accurately predicting these failure modes, evaluating their performance in simulated and real-world scenarios. The findings demonstrate the models' proficiency in identifying early signs of both snap-through and progressive buckling, leading to timely interventions. This capability not only improves railway safety but also aids in efficient maintenance scheduling and asset management. Additionally, a case study in Thailand's railway system demonstrates the model's effectiveness in predicting buckling failures under tropical environmental conditions. This paper contributes a novel perspective to the field of railway infrastructure maintenance. By providing a reliable method for predicting specific buckling failure modes, it paves the way for enhanced operational safety and efficiency in railway networks, particularly in the face of dynamic environmental conditions

A Comparison of Multi-instance Learning Algorithms

Motivated by various challenging real-world applications, such as drug activity prediction and image retrieval, multi-instance (MI) learning has attracted considerable interest in recent years. Compared with standard supervised learning, the MI learning task is more difficult as the label information of each training example is incomplete. Many MI algorithms have been proposed. Some of them are specifically designed for MI problems whereas others have been upgraded or adapted from standard single-instance learning algorithms. Most algorithms have been evaluated on only one or two benchmark datasets, and there is a lack of systematic comparisons of MI learning algorithms. This thesis presents a comprehensive study of MI learning algorithms that aims to compare their performance and find a suitable way to properly address different MI problems. First, it briefly reviews the history of research on MI learning. Then it discusses five general classes of MI approaches that cover a total of 16 MI algorithms. After that, it presents empirical results for these algorithms that were obtained from 15 datasets which involve five different real-world application domains. Finally, some conclusions are drawn from these results: (1) applying suitable standard single-instance learners to MI problems can often generate the best result on the datasets that were tested, (2) algorithms exploiting the standard asymmetric MI assumption do not show significant advantages over approaches using the so-called collective assumption, and (3) different MI approaches are suitable for different application domains, and no MI algorithm works best on all MI problems

Developing Leading and Lagging Indicators to Enhance Equipment Reliability in a Lean System

With increasing complexity in equipment, the failure rates are becoming a critical metric due to the unplanned maintenance in a production environment. Unplanned maintenance in manufacturing process is created issues with downtimes and decreasing the reliability of equipment. Failures in equipment have resulted in the loss of revenue to organizations encouraging maintenance practitioners to analyze ways to change unplanned to planned maintenance. Efficient failure prediction models are being developed to learn about the failures in advance. With this information, failures predicted can reduce the downtimes in the system and improve the throughput. The goal of this thesis is to predict failure in centrifugal pumps using various machine learning models like random forest, stochastic gradient boosting, and extreme gradient boosting. For accurate prediction, historical sensor measurements were modified into leading and lagging indicators which explained the failure patterns in the equipment were developed. The best subset of indicators was selected by filtering using random forest and utilized in the developed model. Finally, the models give a probability of failure before the failure occurs. Appropriate evaluation metrics were used to obtain the accurate model. The proposed methodology was illustrated with two case studies: first, to the centrifugal pump asset performance data provided by Meridium, Inc. and second, the data collected from aircraft turbine engine provided in the NASA prognostics data repository. The automated methodology was shown to develop and identify appropriate failure leading and lagging indicators in both cases and facilitate machine learning model development

Description of rail track geometry deterioration process in Hungarian rail lines No. 1 and No. 140

The aim was the perfection of an analytic examination, which describes the track deterioration process, characterized the correspondences more precisely and better to use in practice. This method was based on the destruction’s theory of the railway track geometry and it exploited the possibilities of recent computer technology. More than one million measuring car (FMK-004) data were processed than analyzed and defined by configuring and programming a new method. The results of this method were descriptive functions, which afford interpretable information about the geometrically destruction’s occurrences of the different railway lines

Data-driven predictive maintenance scheduling policies for railways

Inspection and maintenance activities are essential to preserving safety and cost-effectiveness in railways. However, the stochastic nature of railway defect occurrence is usually ignored in literature; instead, defect stochasticity is considered independently of maintenance scheduling. This study presents a new approach to predict rail and geometry defects that relies on easy-to-obtain data and integrates prediction with inspection and maintenance scheduling activities. In the proposed approach, a novel use of risk-averse and hybrid prediction methodology controls the underestimation of defects. Then, a discounted Markov decision process model utilizes these predictions to determine optimal inspection and maintenance scheduling policies. Furthermore, in the presence of capacity constraints, Whittle indices via the multi-armed restless bandit formulation dynamically provide the optimal policies using the updated transition kernels. Results indicate a high accuracy rate in prediction and effective long-term scheduling policies that are adaptable to changing conditions

Intelligent Condition Monitoring and Prognostic Methods with Applications to Dynamic Seals in the Oil & Gas Industry

The capital-intensive oil & gas industry invests billions of dollars in equipment annually and it is important to keep the equipment in top operating condition to help maintain efficient process operations and improve the rate of return by predicting failures before incidents. Digitalization has taken over the world with advances in sensor technology, wireless communication and computational capabilities, however oil & gas industry has not taken full advantage of this despite being technology centric. Dynamic seals are a vital part of reciprocating and rotary equipment such as compressor, pumps, engines, etc. and are considered most frequently failing component. Polymeric seals are increasingly complex and non-linear in behavior and have been the research of interest since 1950s. Most of the prognostic studies on seals are physics-based and requires direct estimation of different physical parameters to assess the degradation of seals, which are often difficult to obtain during operation. Another feasible approach to predict the failure is from performance related sensor data and is termed as data-driven prognostics. The offline phase of this approach is where the performance related data from the component of interest are acquired, pre-processed and artificial intelligence tools or statistical methods are used to model the degradation of a system. The developed models are then deployed online for a real-time condition monitoring. There is a lack of research on the data-driven based tools and methods for dynamic seal prognosis. The primary goal in this dissertation is to develop offline data-driven intelligent condition monitoring and prognostic methods for two types of dynamic seals used in the oil & gas industry, to avoid fatal breakdown of rotary and reciprocating equipment. Accordingly, the interest in this dissertation lies in developing models to effectively evaluate and classify the running condition of rotary seals; assess the progression of degradation from its incipient to failure and to estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) of reciprocating seals. First, a data-driven prognostic framework is developed to classify the running condition of rotary seals. An accelerated aging and testing procedure simulating rotary seal operation in oil field is developed to capture the behavior of seals through their cycle of operation until failure. The diagnostic capability of torque, leakage and vibration signal in differentiating the health states of rotary seals using experiments are compared. Since the key features that differentiate the health condition of rotary seals are unknown, an extensive feature extraction in time and frequency domain is carried out and a wrapper-based feature selection approach is used to select relevant features, with Multilayer Perceptron neural network utilized as classification technique. The proposed approach has shown that features extracted from torque and leakage lack a better discriminating power on its own, in classifying the running condition of seals throughout its service life. The classifier built using optimal set of features from torque and leakage collectively has resulted in a high classification accuracy when compared to random forest and logistic regression, even for the data collected at a different operating condition. Second, a data-driven approach to predict the degradation process of reciprocating seals based on friction force signal using a hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization - Support Vector Machine is presented. There is little to no knowledge on the feature that reflects the degradation of reciprocating seals and on the application of SVM in predicting the future running condition of polymeric components such as seals. Controlled run-to-failure experiments are designed and performed, and data collected from a dedicated experimental set-up is used to develop the proposed approach. A degradation feature with high monotonicity is used as an indicator of seal degradation. The pseudo nearest neighbor is used to determine the essential number of inputs for forecasting the future trend. The most challenging aspect of tuning parameters in SVM is framed in terms of an optimization problem aimed at minimizing the prediction error. The results indicate the effectiveness and better accuracy of the proposed approach when compared to GA-SVM and XGBoost. Finally, a deep neural network-based approach for estimating remaining useful life of reciprocating seals, using force and leakage signals is presented. Time domain and frequency domain statistical features are extracted from the measurements. An ideal prognostic feature should be well correlated with degradation time, monotonically increasing or decreasing and robust to outliers. The identified metrics namely: monotonicity, correlation and robustness are used to evaluate the goodness of extracted features. Each of the three metric carries a relative importance in the RUL estimation and a weighted linear combination of the metrics are used to rank and select the best set of prognostic features. The redundancy in the selected features is eliminated using Kelley-Gardner-Sutcliffe penalty function-based correlation-clustering algorithm to select a representative feature from each of the clusters. Finally, RUL estimation is modeled using a deep neural network model. Run-to-failure data collected from a reciprocating set-up was used to validate this approach and the findings show that the proposed approach can improve the accuracy of RUL prediction when compared to PSO-SVM and XGBoost regression. This research has important contribution and implications to rotary and reciprocating seal domain in utilizing sensors along with machine learning algorithms in assessing the health state and prognosis of seals without any direct measurements. This research has paved the way to move from a traditional fail-and-fix to predict-and-prevent approach in maintenance of seals. The findings of this research are foundational for developing an online degradation assessment platform which can remotely monitor the performance degradation of seals and provide action recommendations on maintenance decisions. This would be of great interest to customers and oil field operators to improve equipment utilization, control maintenance cost by enabling just-in-time maintenance and increase rate of return on equipment by predicting failures before incidents