Evolutionary Design of Lifting Scheme Wavelet-
Packet Adaptive Filters for Elevator Fault Detection
Pasquale Arpaia
1
, Ernesto De Matteis
1
, Giuseppe Montenero
1
, Carlo Manna
2
1 - Department of Engineering
University of Sannio
Benevento, Italy
arpaia@unisannio.it
2 - Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Naples Federico II
Napoli, Italy
manna.cnr@gmail.com
Abstract—An evolutionary-based procedure for designing
adaptive filters based on second-generation wavelet (lifting
scheme) packet decomposition for industrial fault detection is
presented. The proposed procedure is validated by an
experimental case study for induction motor fault diagnosis in an
elevator system. Preliminary results on two typologies of faults,
broken rotor bars and static air gap eccentricity, are discussed by
showing encouraging performance.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Fault Diagnosis, Wavelet
Transforms.
I. INTRODUCTION
Elevator systems are typical and conventional
transportation tools in modern towns. They provide quick
access within buildings, especially for the high-rise one.
However, long-time usage of the system increases fault-
occurrence probability [1]. This is a critical issue: when a fault
on the system occurs , it causes problems both to people living
in the building (especially to most ancient) and to workers.
For these reasons, companies providing installation and
maintenance consider correct inspection and fault detection
most critical issues, in order to restore the elevator system
rapidly and preserve their business.
According to literature survey [1],[3], faults in induction
motors used as traction machine for the elevator systems are
the most critical faulty conditions. In order to ensure safe
operation, timely maintenance and preventive rescue, on-line
fault detection on elevator traction machines is a critical task.
Fault detection for induction motors are generally classified
as electrical faults and mechanical faults. For both of them,
literature presents different diagnostic methods, such as
temperature measurement, acoustic noise analysis , infrared
measurements, and motor current signature analysis (MCSA)
[4].
Among these techniques, MCSA [5] turned out to be the
most popular for twofold reasons: (i) it is minimally invasive
because stator currents are detected from the terminals; and (ii)
it can detect both mechanical and electrical faults. The idea
behind MCSA is the following: when a fault (mechanical or
electrical) in the motor occurs, usually it causes an abnormality
in the frequency spectrum of the stator currents. In other words,
the fault exhibit itself a feature in the spectrum of the stator
current signal, normally easily detected by Fast Fourier
Transform (FFT).
In lasts years, various faults detection techniques based on
MCSA were proposed exploiting Discrete Wavelet Transform
(DWT) [6] or Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD) [3],
combined to FFT in order to obtain an effective features
extraction, especially when the stator currents exhibit a
complex spectrum due to power electronic drives of the
induction motor.
For on-line fault detection embedded on low-cost
microcontrollers, the aforementioned techniques are not
appropriate due to the computational complexity, needing for
excessive resources. One of the possible solutions [7] is a WPD
based on the lifting scheme [2], also called second-generation
wavelet. This method has twofold advantages: (i) the WPD
allows a time-frequency localization better than traditional
DWT, fostering fault-features identification; and (ii) the
second-generation wavelet are less computationally complex
than traditional wavelet, because the lifting scheme technique
not requires the FFT as design tool for wavelets.
The lifting scheme consists in four main steps: split,
prediction, compute and update. While the splitting is a trivial
task, the last three steps (prediction, compute and update) needs
for defining mathematical functions: thus, a detailed
description of the signal analyzed is not easy to be achieved.
On this basis, in a previous work [8], the authors showed
the capability of evolutionary procedures (based on cultural
algorithms (CA) [10]) of optimizing effectively the design of
adaptive wavelet filters based on lifting scheme. However,
from the fault detection point of view, the description of the
analyzed signal should as much as possible accurate in order to
detect anomalies in frequency when the fault occurred.
In this paper. an evolutionary procedure, based on cultural
algorithm to design an optimal lifting scheme WPD (LSWPD)
of the signal, is proposed. By means of a cultural algorithm-
based procedure, for each kind of faults to detect, an optimal
LSWPD of a signal capable of highlighting the corresponding
features, is designed.
II. PROPOSED METHOD
In the following, (A) the design problem, and (B) the
proposed evolutionary approach are detailed.
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