2024 journal article
Developing hybrid machine learning models to assign health score to railcar fleets for optimal decision making
Expert Systems with Applications.
arxiv.org (repository)
Source: ORCID
Added: April 15, 2024
A large amount of data is generated during the operation of a railcar fleet, which can easily lead to dimensional disaster and reduce the resiliency of the railcar network. To solve these issues and offer predictive maintenance, this research introduces a hybrid fault diagnosis expert system method that combines density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and principal component analysis (PCA). Firstly, the DBSCAN method is used to cluster categorical data that are similar to one another within the same group. Secondly, PCA algorithm is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the data and eliminate redundancy in order to improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis. Finally, we explain the engineered features and evaluate the selected models by using the Gain Chart and Area Under Curve (AUC) metrics. We use the hybrid expert system model to enhance maintenance planning decisions by assigning a health score to the railcar system of the North American Railcar Owner (NARO). The model is based on data from one specific railcar type. We utilize the results of data-driven models to assign a health rate to each railcar. Finally, we use data from NARO to evaluate and verify our proposed framework.