ASSISTANCE APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY IDENTIFYING FAILURE TYPES OF A TECHNICAL SYSTEM

Assistance apparatus for automatically identifying failure types of a technical system by analysing monitored time series of more than one different sensor data, each sensor data representing a different parameter of the technical system, comprising at least one processor configured to- determine for each sensor data a set of specific temporal courses of first time series of said sensor data of said sensor and assign a symbolic representation to each of the different specific temporal courses,- provide at least one failure pattern, each failure pattern representing one failure type out of several failure types of the technical system and each failure pattern consisting of a failure-type-specific combination of specific temporal courses of the first time series of at least a subset of sensor data in the same segment of time, wherein each specific temporal course is represented by the respective symbolic representation,- obtain more than one monitored time series of sensor data of the technical system, each of them divided into a sequence of time segments, and automatically assign to each time segment a symbolic representations (20, 27) according to the temporal course of the sensor data in the time segment,- calculate a similarity measure for the set of symbolic representations of a selected time interval of the obtained more than one monitored time series of sensor data and all failure patterns,- determine a ranking of the failure pattern depending on decreasing values of the calculated similarity measure, and- output the ranking via a user interface.