Temporal-logic-based Semantic Fault Diagnosis with Time-series Data from Industrial Internet of Things

The maturity of sensor network technologies has facilitated the emergence of an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which has collected an increasing volume of data. Converting these data into actionable intelligence for fault diagnosis is key to, e.g., reducing unscheduled downtime and performance degradation. This paper formalizes a problem called semantic fault diagnosis–to construct the formal specifications of faults directly from data collected from IIoT-enabled systems. The specifications are written as signal temporal logic formulas, which can be easily interpreted by humans. To tackle the issue of the combinatorial explosion which arises, we propose an algorithm that combines ideas from agenda-based searching and imitation learning to train a policy that searches formulas in a strategic order. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a Markov decision process, which is further solved with a reinforcement learning algorithm. Our algorithm is applied to time series data collected from an IIoT-enabled iron-making factory. The results show empirically that our proposed algorithm is both scalable to the size of the data set and interpretable, therefore allowing human users to take actions for, e.g., predictive maintenance.