Marine Engine Fault Dataset: Open-Access Data under Controlled Reference and Fault Scenario Conditions
Authors: Ahmad BahooToroody, Oleksiy Bondarenko, Mohammad Mahdi Abaei, Niki Yoichi, Enrico Zio
Abstract
Open-access datasets for marine-engine predictive maintenance remain scarce, particularly those from controlled fault experiments with documented operating conditions, subsystem-level interventions and system-level measurements. This work presents the Marine Engine Fault Dataset, an openly available dataset from a turbocharged, intercooled three-cylinder marine diesel engine operated on a testbed under both reference and fault-scenario conditions. The experimental campaign combined a reference-performance program across the 30-90% load range with scenario-based tests in which abnormal conditions were introduced after stabilized fault-free operation, enabling controlled comparison between baseline and fault-affected behaviour. Five anomaly classes were implemented through physical interventions affecting major engine subsystems: cooling-water pump cavitation, compressor air-filter clogging, air-cooler fouling, injection-valve nozzle clogging and turbine degradation induced through increased exhaust-side restriction. The released data comprise multi-sensor time-series of operating, thermal, pressure, flow and combustion-related variables, with a separate reference-performance record and metadata for structured reuse. Technical validation shows that the reference measurements remain physically coherent across the operating range and that the imposed anomalies produce interpretable response patterns consistent with the affected subsystems, including progressively distinguishable behaviour where different severities were implemented. By combining controlled fault realization, multi-load operation and system-level measurements within a real marine-engine platform, the dataset provides a well-documented benchmark for anomaly detection, fault diagnosis, degradation modelling and related condition-monitoring studies in maritime machinery.
Normal behavior models have shown promise for reliable fault detection in wind turbines. However, these unsupervised anomaly detection models require sufficient fault-free training data to learn the normal operation behavior of turbines. Under data scarcity, for example in newly deployed wind turbines, these models may result in poor fault detection performance. In this work, we propose a multi-domain generative domain mapping approach based on Star Generative Adversarial Networks (StarGAN) to improve fault detection on data-scarce wind turbines. Our model maps SCADA measurements from a data-scarce turbine to resemble those of several data-rich turbines. By preserving the operational state during translation, faults occurring in a data-scarce domain can be mapped and detected by reliable pre-trained normal behavior models of data-rich domains. Highlighting the benefits of an ensemble fusion strategy, we show that under severe data scarcity our method can produce anomaly scores comparable to models trained on large representative datasets. Our approach can consistently outperform models trained on scarce data when less than 2 weeks of training data are available. With just 2 weeks of accumulated training data, we achieve an anomaly score similarity that is, on average, +16% higher than conventional fine-tuning, and +10% higher than single-source domain mapping. As a step towards unsupervised model selection, we propose a proxy metric that detects poor performance at training time, despite an absence of anomalies. Our study presents the potential and challenges of multi-domain mapping for wind turbine fault detection under unrepresentative training data.
In many cyber-physical systems, especially in critical applications such as aeroplanes, data to train anomaly detection and diagnosis algorithms is lacking due to data protection issues and partial observability. To combat this inherent lack of data, we introduce a high-fidelity, physics-informed co-simulation of a common aircraft main-fuel-pump system modelled in \textsc{MATLAB/Simulink Simscape Fluids}. We also describe its generated time-series data with health and fault mode annotations. To show feasibility of our benchmark, we apply an unsupervised Recurrent Variational Autoencoder (RNN-VAE) for anomaly detection and a SOM-VAE for operating mode discretization, trained to separate healthy and faulty conditions.
Felix Leonhard Janzen, Lukas Moddemann, Alexander Diedrich +1
Most public benchmarks for machine-condition monitoring come from test rigs, where faults are induced on purpose and every event is known. Real production fields rarely offer that. They give you sensor histories with no fault log attached, which is exactly the situation where an anomaly-detection method has to invent its own labels, and where quiet assumptions can slip in unnoticed. We work with the open Volve field data released by Equinor and take two things seriously that such datasets usually skip. First, we build anomaly labels that are not just patterns in the numbers but are checked against what the field's own engineering documents say can physically go wrong, and we release the reasoning behind every label. Second, we test whether those constructed labels are learnable at all, using both an unsupervised baseline and a small dual-head model that marks when an event happens and what kind it is, an idea we carry over from earlier work on defect detection in metal parts. The results are honest. An unsupervised detector that never sees the labels still lands on the same regions our rules flagged, which tells us the labels are not arbitrary. A compact supervised model recovers event presence and event type well across wells it has never seen, and locates events in time only roughly. We report what worked, what did not, and every assumption in between. The dataset, grounded labels, per-label provenance, baseline scores, trained model, and code are released publicly under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0.