Thomas Arnold

Logan Cummins, Alexander Sommers, Sudip Mittal et al.

There exists three main areas of study inside of the field of predictive maintenance: anomaly detection, fault diagnosis, and remaining useful life prediction. Notably, anomaly detection alerts the stakeholder that an anomaly is occurring. This raises two fundamental questions: what is causing the fault and how can we fix it? Inside of the field of explainable artificial intelligence, counterfactual explanations can give that information in the form of what changes to make to put the data point into the opposing class, in this case "healthy". The suggestions are not always actionable which may raise the interest in asking "what if we do this instead?" In this work, we provide a proof of concept for utilizing counterfactual explanations as what-if analysis. We perform this on the PRONOSTIA dataset with a temporal convolutional network as the anomaly detector. Our method presents the counterfactuals in the form of a what-if analysis for this base problem to inspire future work for more complex systems and scenarios.

Alicia Russell-Gilbert, Alexander Sommers, Andrew Thompson et al.

For data-constrained, complex and dynamic industrial environments, there is a critical need for transferable and multimodal methodologies to enhance anomaly detection and therefore, prevent costs associated with system failures. Typically, traditional PdM approaches are not transferable or multimodal. This work examines the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for anomaly detection in complex and dynamic manufacturing systems. The research aims to improve the transferability of anomaly detection models by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and seeks to validate the enhanced effectiveness of the proposed approach in data-sparse industrial applications. The research also seeks to enable more collaborative decision-making between the model and plant operators by allowing for the enriching of input series data with semantics. Additionally, the research aims to address the issue of concept drift in dynamic industrial settings by integrating an adaptability mechanism. The literature review examines the latest developments in LLM time series tasks alongside associated adaptive anomaly detection methods to establish a robust theoretical framework for the proposed architecture. This paper presents a novel model framework (AAD-LLM) that doesn't require any training or finetuning on the dataset it is applied to and is multimodal. Results suggest that anomaly detection can be converted into a "language" task to deliver effective, context-aware detection in data-constrained industrial applications. This work, therefore, contributes significantly to advancements in anomaly detection methodologies.

Alicia Russell-Gilbert, Sudip Mittal, Shahram Rahimi et al.

Anomaly detection in complex industrial environments poses unique challenges, particularly in contexts characterized by data sparsity and evolving operational conditions. Predictive maintenance (PdM) in such settings demands methodologies that are adaptive, transferable, and capable of integrating domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we present RAAD-LLM, a novel framework for adaptive anomaly detection, leveraging large language models (LLMs) integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This approach addresses the aforementioned PdM challenges. By effectively utilizing domain-specific knowledge, RAAD-LLM enhances the detection of anomalies in time series data without requiring fine-tuning on specific datasets. The framework's adaptability mechanism enables it to adjust its understanding of normal operating conditions dynamically, thus increasing detection accuracy. We validate this methodology through a real-world application for a plastics manufacturing plant and the Skoltech Anomaly Benchmark (SKAB). Results show significant improvements over our previous model with an accuracy increase from 70.7% to 88.6% on the real-world dataset. By allowing for the enriching of input series data with semantics, RAAD-LLM incorporates multimodal capabilities that facilitate more collaborative decision-making between the model and plant operators. Overall, our findings support RAAD-LLM's ability to revolutionize anomaly detection methodologies in PdM, potentially leading to a paradigm shift in how anomaly detection is implemented across various industries.

Andrew Thompson, Alexander Sommers, Alicia Russell-Gilbert et al.

Predictive maintenance has been used to optimize system repairs in the industrial, medical, and financial domains. This technique relies on the consistent ability to detect and predict anomalies in critical systems. AI models have been trained to detect system faults, improving predictive maintenance efficiency. Typically there is a lack of fault data to train these models, due to organizations working to keep fault occurrences and down time to a minimum. For newly installed systems, no fault data exists since they have yet to fail. By using diffusion models for synthetic data generation, the complex training datasets for these predictive models can be supplemented with high level synthetic fault data to improve their performance in anomaly detection. By learning the relationship between healthy and faulty data in similar systems, a diffusion model can attempt to apply that relationship to healthy data of a newly installed system that has no fault data. The diffusion model would then be able to generate useful fault data for the new system, and enable predictive models to be trained for predictive maintenance. The following paper demonstrates a system for generating useful, multivariate synthetic data for predictive maintenance, and how it can be applied to systems that have yet to fail.

Alexander Sommers, Logan Cummins, Sudip Mittal et al.

Generative AI has received much attention in the image and language domains, with the transformer neural network continuing to dominate the state of the art. Application of these models to time series generation is less explored, however, and is of great utility to machine learning, privacy preservation, and explainability research. The present survey identifies this gap at the intersection of the transformer, generative AI, and time series data, and reviews works in this sparsely populated subdomain. The reviewed works show great variety in approach, and have not yet converged on a conclusive answer to the problems the domain poses. GANs, diffusion models, state space models, and autoencoders were all encountered alongside or surrounding the transformers which originally motivated the survey. While too open a domain to offer conclusive insights, the works surveyed are quite suggestive, and several recommendations for best practice, and suggestions of valuable future work, are provided.