Fault Detection in Distributed Climate Sensor Networks Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program operated by the U.S. Department of Energy is one of the largest climate research programs dedicated to the collection of long-term continuous measurements of cloud properties and other key components of the earth´s climate system. Given the critical role that collected ARM data plays in the analysis of atmospheric processes and conditions and in the enhancement and evaluation of global climate models, the production and distribution of high-quality data is one of ARM´s primary mission objectives. Fault detection in ARM´s distributed sensor network is one critical ingredient towards maintaining high quality and useful data. We are modeling ARM´s distributed sensor network as a dynamic Bayesian network where key measurements are mapped to Bayesian network variables. We then define the conditional dependencies between variables by discovering highly correlated variable pairs from historical data. The resultant dynamic Bayesian network provides an automated approach to identifying whether certain sensors are malfunctioning or failing in the distributed sensor network. A potential fault or failure is detected when an observed measurement is not consistent with its expected measurement and the observed measurements of other related sensors in the Bayesian network. We present some of our experiences and promising results with the fault detection dynamic Bayesian network.