Development of a hierarchical clustering method for anomaly identification and labelling of marine machinery data

The application of artificial intelligence models for the fault diagnosis of marine machinery increased expeditiously within the shipping industry. This relates to the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in capturing fault patterns in marine systems that are becoming more complex and where the application of traditional methods is becoming unfeasible. However, despite these advances, the lack of fault labelling data is still a major concern due to confidentiality issues, and lack of appropriate data, for instance. In this study, a method based on histogram similarity and hierarchical clustering is proposed as an attempt to label the distinct anomalies and faults that occur in the dataset so that supervised learning can then be implemented. To validate the proposed methodology, a case study on a main engine of a tanker vessel is considered. The results indicate that the method can be a preliminary option to classify and label distinct types of faults and anomalies that may appear in the dataset, as the model achieved an accuracy of approximately 95% for the case study presented.