XAI4Wind: A Multimodal Knowledge Graph Database for Explainable Decision Support in Operations & Maintenance of Wind Turbines

Abstract

Condition-based monitoring (CBM) has been widely utilised in the wind industry for monitoring operational inconsistencies and failures in turbines, with techniques ranging from signal processing and vibration analysis to artificial intelligence (AI) models using Supervisory Control & Acquisition (SCADA) data. However, existing studies do not present a concrete basis to facilitate explainable decision support in operations and maintenance (O&M), particularly for automated decision support through recommendation of appropriate maintenance action reports corresponding to failures predicted by CBM techniques. Knowledge graph databases (KGs) model a collection of domain-specific information and have played an intrinsic role for real-world decision support in domains such as healthcare and finance, but have seen very limited attention in the wind industry. We propose XAI4Wind, a multimodal knowledge graph for explainable decision support in real-world operational turbines and demonstrate through experiments several use-cases of the proposed KG towards O&M planning through interactive query and reasoning and providing novel insights using graph data science algorithms. The proposed KG combines multimodal knowledge like SCADA parameters and alarms with natural language maintenance actions, images etc. By integrating our KG with an Explainable AI model for anomaly prediction, we show that it can provide effective human-intelligible O&M strategies for predicted operational inconsistencies in various turbine sub-components. This can help instil better trust and confidence in conventionally black-box AI models. We make our KG publicly available and envisage that it can serve as the building ground for providing autonomous decision support in the wind industry.