Monitoring and maintaining the equipment to ensure its reliability and availability is vital to industrial operations. With the rapid development and growth of interconnected devices, the Internet of Things promotes digitization of industrial assets, to be sensed and controlled across existing networks, enabling access to a vast amount of sensor data that can be used for condition monitoring. However, the traditional way of gaining knowledge and wisdom, by the expert, for designing condition monitoring methods is unfeasible for fully utilizing and digesting this enormous amount of information. It does not scale well to complex systems with a huge amount of components and subsystems. Therefore, a more automated approach that relies on human experts to a lesser degree, being capable of discovering interesting patterns, generating models for estimating the health status of the equipment, supporting maintenance scheduling, and can scale up to many equipment and its subsystems, will provide great benefits for the industry. 

This thesis demonstrates how to utilize the concept of "Wisdom of the Crowd", i.e. a group of similar individuals, for fault detection and prognosis. The approach is built based on an unsupervised deviation detection method, Consensus Self-Organizing Models (COSMO). The method assumes that the majority of a crowd is healthy; individual deviates from the majority are considered as potentially faulty. The COSMO method encodes sensor data into models, and the distances between individual samples and the crowd are measured in the model space. This information, regarding how different an individual performs compared to its peers, is utilized as an indicator for estimating the health status of the equipment. The generality of the COSMO method is demonstrated with three condition monitoring case studies: i) fault detection and failure prediction for a commercial fleet of city buses, ii) prognosis for a fleet of turbofan engines and iii) finding cracks in metallic material. In addition, the flexibility of the COSMO method is demonstrated with: i) being capable of incorporating domain knowledge on specializing relevant expert features; ii) able to detect multiple types of faults with a generic data- representation, i.e. Echo State Network; iii) incorporating expert feedback on adapting reference group candidate under an active learning setting. Last but not least, this thesis demonstrated that the remaining useful life of the equipment can be estimated from the distance to a crowd of peers. 

The ability to diagnose deviations and predict faults effectively is an important task in various industrial domains for minimizing costs and productivity loss and also conserving environmental resources. However, the majority of the efforts for diagnostics are still carried out by human experts in a time-consuming and expensive manner. Automated data-driven solutions are needed for continuous monitoring of complex systems over time. On the other hand, domain expertise plays a significant role in developing, evaluating, and improving diagnostics and monitoring functions. Therefore, automatically derived solutions must be able to interact with domain experts by taking advantage of available a priori knowledge and by incorporating their feedback into the learning process.

This thesis and appended papers tackle the problem of generating a real-world self-monitoring system for continuous monitoring of machines and operations by developing algorithms that can learn data streams and their relations over time and detect anomalies using joint-human machine learning. Throughout this thesis, we have described a number of different approaches, each designed for the needs of a self-monitoring system, and have composed these methods into a coherent framework. More specifically, we presented a two-layer meta-framework, in which the first layer was concerned with learning appropriate data representations and detectinganomalies in an unsupervised fashion, and the second layer aimed at interactively exploiting available expert knowledge in a joint human-machine learning fashion.

Furthermore, district heating has been the focus of this thesis as the application domain with the goal of automatically detecting faults and anomalies by comparing heat demands among different groups of customers. We applied and enriched different methods on this domain, which then contributed to the development and improvement of the meta-framework. The contributions that result from the studies included in this work can be summarized into four categories: (1) exploring different data representations that are suitable for the self-monitoring task based on data characteristics and domain knowledge, (2) discovering patterns and groups in data that describe normal behavior of the monitored system/systems, (3) implementing methods to successfully discriminate anomalies from the normal behavior, and (4) incorporating domain knowledge and expert feedback into self-monitoring.