Recurrent Autoencoder Ensembles for Brake Operating Unit Anomaly Detection on Metro Vehicles

The anomaly detection of the brake operating unit (BOU) in thebrake systems on metro vehicle is critical for the safety and reliability ofthe trains. On the other hand, current periodic inspection and maintenanceare unable to detect anomalies in an early stage. Also, building an accurateand stable system for detecting anomalies is extremely difficult. Therefore,we present an efficient model that use an ensemble of recurrent autoencodersto accurately detect the BOU abnormalities of metro trains. This is the firstproposal to employ an ensemble deep learning technique to detect BOUabnormalities in metro train braking systems. One of the anomalous caseson metro vehicles is the case when the air cylinder (AC) pressures are less thanthe brake cylinder (BC) pressures in certain parts where the brake pressuresincrease before coming to a halt. Hence, in this work, we first extract the dataof BC and AC pressures. Then, the extracted data of BC and AC pressuresare divided into multiple subsequences that are used as an input for bothbi-directional long short-term memory (biLSTM) and bi-directional gatedrecurrent unit (biGRU) autoencoders. The biLSTM and biGRU autoencodersare trained using training dataset that only contains normal subsequences. Fordetecting abnormalities from test dataset which consists of abnormal subsequences, the mean absolute errors (MAEs) between original subsequences andreconstructed subsequences from both biLSTM and biGRU autoencoders arecalculated. As an ensemble step, the total error is calculated by averaging twoMAEs from biLSTM and biGRU autoencoders. The subsequence with totalerror greater than a pre-defined threshold value is considered an abnormality.We carried out the experiments using the BOU dataset on metro vehiclesin South Korea. Experimental results demonstrate that the ensemble modelshows better performance than other autoencoder-based models, which showsthe effectiveness of our ensemble model for detecting BOU anomalies onmetro trains.