On Optimizing Anomaly Detection Rules for Gas Turbine Health Monitoring

Abstract

Gas turbine health monitoring is a critical process in preventing costly unplanned maintenance and secondary damage. To monitor gas turbine health, control signals are typically collected and analyzed using anomaly detection rules and models to assess failure likelihood based on observed data patterns. An analytic designer will often deal with rule optimization tasks in order to maximize failure detection and reduce false alarms. Manual tradeoff analysis is typically time consuming and suboptimal. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by introducing a strategy for automatic and efficient rule optimization. By focusing on optimizing rule parameters while keeping rule structure intact, we maximize the rule performance by integrating domain knowledge with data driven optimization techniques. Realizing that automated rule tuning can be computationally expensive and infeasible to complete in reasonable time, we will leverage our recently-developed scalable learning framework - iScale that allows for automatically distributing rule tuning tasks to a large number of cloud computers, which not only dramatically speeds up tuning process, but also enables us to handle big size of historical data for tuning. We also explore different search methods to make rule tuning more efficient and effective and finally demonstrate our rule optimization strategy by a real-world application.