Integration of ART-Kohonen neural network and case-based reasoning for intelligent fault diagnosis

This paper presents a new approach for integrating case-based reasoning (CBR) with an ART-Kohonen neural network (ART-KNN) to enhance fault diagnosis. When solving a new problem, the neural network is used to make hypotheses and to guide the CBR module in the search for a similar previous case that supports one of the hypotheses. The knowledge acquired by the network is interpreted and mapped into symbolic diagnosis descriptors, which are kept and used by the system to determine whether a final answer is credible, and to build explanations for the reasoning carried out. ART-KNN, synthesizing the theory of adaptive resonance theory and the learning strategy of Kohonen neural network, can solve the plasticity-stability dilemma of conventional neural networks. It can carry out ‘on-line’ training without forgetting previously trained patterns (stable training), and recode previously trained categories adaptive to changes in the environment and is self-organizing, which differs from most of networks that only can be carried out off-line. The proposed system has been used in the faults diagnosis of electric motor to verify the system performance. The result shows the proposed system performs better than self-organizing feature map (SOFM) based system with respect to classification rate. q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.