Automation of Predictive Maintenance: An Experimental Framework for
Aircraft Landing Gear
Abstract
Terabytes of data are recorded per flight by modern aircraft, providing
a goldmine for predictive maintenance modelling, however, the required
domain knowledge to build machine learning tools limits the number
developed by airline manufacturers each year. Automated machine learning
(AutoML) libraries can simplify model development, providing features
such as automated preprocessing, model selection and hyperparameter
tuning to improve the efficiency and accessibility of the development
workflow. This research presents an experimental analysis comparing
industry-selected machine-learning models and a hand-picked selection of
automated machine-learning tools. The selected models were evaluated
against real and synthetic time series datasets for different Airbus
landing gear components across six datasets. The traditional and
automated models obtained comparable MAE and F1 scores on regression and
classification problems accordingly, demonstrating the effectiveness of
their use in this field. Based on these findings, a robust framework is
proposed to utilise automated machine learning to optimise predictive
maintenance tool development. This research is a stepping stone towards
greater use of automation for predictive maintenance and presents
insights into the field and AutoML. By integrating greater automation,
AutoML can exploit more of the available data, and deskill the
development process to enable non-data scientists to produce health
monitoring models for a more diverse pool of aircraft components.