A feasibility study on the implementation of visibility algorithms for fault diagnosis in aircraft fuel systems

Abstract

This paper discusses the applicability of Visibility Algorithms to detect faults in condition monitoring applications. The general purpose of Visibility Algorithms is to transform time series into graphs and study them through the characterisation of their associated network. Degradation of a component results in changes to the network. This technique has been applied using a test rig of an aircraft fuel system to show that there is a correlation between the values of key metrics of visibility graphs and the severity of four failure modes. We compare the results of using Horizontal Visibility algorithms against Natural Visibility algorithms. The results also show how the Kullback-Leibler divergence and statistical entropy can be used to produce condition indicators. Experimental results show that there is little dispersion in the values of condition indicators, leading to a low probability of false positives and false negatives.