Explainable Predictive Condition-based Maintenance of Naval-Propulsion Systems using Fuzzy Logic

The shipping industry has a significant impact on the global economy, emphasizing the need for operational availability and safety through the use of effective maintenance techniques. During the last decades, predictive maintenance (PdM) has emerged as a promising solution compared to the existing conventional maintenance systems. This is because it offers several advantageous functions, such as damage predictions for vessel components, reduced downtime, improved and extended life of machinery, as well as higher safety during voyages. However, existing methodologies developed for performing PdM do not provide explanations of their results to users, so that they can understand the failures that may occur. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel framework based on a fuzzy decision tree and a deep residual neural network, aiming to perform explainable PdM on naval vessels. The proposed framework is able to generate fuzzy local rules based on the dataset used, and can provide explanations of its outcomes, using cause-and-effect relationships, in a way that are understandable to users, thereby gaining their trust. Experiments using a publicly available dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, as it achieves an accuracy of 99.24%.