Data Science Application for Failure Data Management and Failure Prediction in the Oil and Gas Industry: A Case Study

In the industrial domain, maintenance is essential to guarantee the correct operations, availability, and efficiency of machinery and systems. With the advent of Industry 4.0, solutions based on machine learning can be used for the prediction of future failures by exploiting historical failure data. Most of the time, these historical data have been collected by companies without a specific structure, schema, or even best practices, resulting in a potential loss of knowledge. In this paper, we analyze the historical data on maintenance alerts of the components of a revamping topping plant (referred to as RT2) belonging to the SARAS group. This analysis is done in collaboration with the ITALTELECO company, a partner of SARAS, that provided the necessary data. The pre-processing methodology to clean and fill these data and extract features useful for a prediction task will be shown. More in detail, we show the process to fill missing fields of these data to provide (i) a category for each fault by using simple natural language processing techniques and performing a clustering, and (ii) a data structure that can enable machine learning models and statistical approaches to perform reliable failure predictions. The data domain in which this methodology is applied is oil and gas, but it may be generalized and reformulated in various industrial and/or academic fields. The ultimate goal of our work is to obtain a procedure that is simple and can be applied to provide strategic support for the definition of an adequate maintenance plan.