A systematic procedure for the analysis of maintenance reports based on a taxonomy and BERT attention mechanism

Dario Valcamonico, Piero Baraldi, July Bias Macêdo, Moura, Márcio Das Chagas, Jonathan Brown, Gauthier, Stéphane and Enrico Zio

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2025, vol. 257, issue PA

Abstract: This work proposes a systematic procedure for analyzing maintenance reports to support maintenance decision-making for a fleet of similar systems. The proposed procedure allows achieving three objectives: (1) grouping maintenance interventions, (2) identifying common characteristics in the maintenance interventions, and (3) recognizing occurrences of rare events of maintenance intervention. Specifically, the attention mechanism of Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) and the Density Based Spatial Clustering Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) methods are combined to group maintenance interventions according to their similarity of stated features. A taxonomy of the words used in the textual reports to state the maintenance interventions is developed to systematically identify common features of the clusters, such as the involved components, their working state, the occurred failures or malfunctions, the performed maintenance actions and the personnel that has performed the intervention. The proposed procedure is applied to a repository of reports of maintenance interventions performed on mechanical and electric components of traction systems of a fleet of trains. The obtained results show that it can effectively support decision-making on the maintenance of traction systems.

Keywords: Maintenance; Natural Language Processing; BERT; DBSCAN; Freight transport trains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832025000377
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:257:y:2025:i:pa:s0951832025000377

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2025.110834

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().