An Entropy-Based Car Failure Detection Method Based on Data Acquisition Pipeline

Modern cars are equipped with plenty of electronic devices called Electronic Control Units (ECU). ECUs collect diagnostic data from a car's components such as the engine, brakes etc. These data are then processed, and the appropriate information is communicated to the driver. From the point of view of safety of the driver and the passengers, the information about the car faults is vital. Regardless of the development of on-board computers, only a small amount of information is passed on to the driver. With the data mining approach, it is possible to obtain much more information from the data than it is provided by standard car equipment. This paper describes the environment built by the authors for data collection from ECUs. The collected data have been processed using parameterized entropies and data mining algorithms. Finally, we built a classifier able to detect a malfunctioning thermostat even if the car equipment does not indicate it.