Detecting and Characterizing Patterns of Failure in Complex Engineered Systems: An Ontology Development and Clustering Approach

Abstract

While the causes of failures in complex engineered systems are often clear in hindsight, it can be challenging to predict failures proactively during the design of novel engineered products or systems. Identifying patterns can be useful for capturing common characteristics that may lead to failure. In this paper, we present a methodology for identifying patterns of failure from NASA's publicly available Lessons Learned Information System (LLIS). We apply an ontology development and clustering approach to identify representative patterns leading to failures in historical lessons learned. A joint inductive-deductive approach reveals the key themes in lessons that lead to failure, which are formalized and recorded as an ontology of complex systems failure causes. Documents from the LLIS are manually tagged with relevant characteristics from the ontology. From the tagged set, clustering is used to capture co-occurring sets of characteristics that lead to failure. The primary contribution of this work is a method for extracting a set of generic failure patterns in complex engineered systems and characteristics for these patterns that can be identified at design time, knowledge of which can be used to plan mitigation strategies.

Ilmenau’s contributions to Design Science

“…In research, questions concerning all steps of the development process are discussed, in order to develop robust solutions in the context of the different requirements and external as well as internal influences (Eifler & Schleich 2021;Husung et al 2023;Li et al 2023). Increasingly, approaches from Virtual Product Development are being used: from tolerance simulations (Heling et al 2018) to Pareto optimisations (Bode et al 2023) and knowledge-based solutions (Faheem et al 2023;Walsh et al 2023). Thus, the variance of parameters can be taken into 54/73 account early on, helping master the complexity of mechatronic or cybertronic solutions.…”