Aggregated information fusion for enhanced diagnostics, prognostics and maintenance practices of vehicles

A method for providing vehicle diagnostics and prognostics evaluations, said method comprising:

• collecting data from vehicle components, sub-systems and systems on vehicles;
• storing the collected data in a database either onboard the vehicles or off-board the vehicles;
• telematically transmitting the collected data from the vehicles to a remote data center;
• generating classes for different types of the collected data at the remote data center, where the classes include working, impending failure and faulty;
• building feature extractors for each class using data mining techniques of the data stored in the database at the remote data center;
• generating feature classifiers that classify features for each class at the remote data center;
• using the feature extractors and the feature classifiers to determine when a fault condition has occurred for a vehicle component, sub-system or system;
• combining outputs for multiple feature classifiers to increase the robustness for determining when a fault condition occurs;
• and
• transmitting fault condition results back to the vehicles.

A system for providing vehicle diagnostics and prognostics evaluations, said system comprising:

• means for collecting data from vehicle components, sub-systems and systems on a vehicle;
• means for storing the collected data in a database on the vehicle;
• means for transmitting the collected data telematically to a remote data center;
• means for generating classes for different types of collected data at the remote data center, where the classes include working, impending failure and faulty;
• means for building feature extractors for each class using data mining techniques of the data stored in a database on the remote data center;
• means for generating feature classifiers that classify the features for each class;
• and
• means for using the feature extractors and feature classifiers to determine when a fault condition has occurred for a vehicle component, sub-system or system.