Global solar broadband irradiance on a planar surface is measured at weather stations by pyranometers. In the case of the present research, solar radiation values from nine meteorological stations of the MeteoGalicia real-time observational network, captured and stored every ten minutes, are considered. In this kind of record, the lack of data and/or the presence of wrong values adversely affects any time series study. Consequently, when this occurs, a data imputation process must be performed in order to replace missing data with estimated values. This paper aims to evaluate the multivariate imputation of ten-minute scale data by means of the chained equations method (MICE). This method allows the network itself to impute the missing or wrong data of a solar radiation sensor, by using either all or just a group of the measurements of the remaining sensors. Very good results have been obtained with the MICE method in comparison with other methods employed in this field such as Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR). The average RMSE value of the predictions for the MICE algorithm was 13.37% while that for the MLR it was 28.19%, and 31.68% for the IDW.

Prognostics is an engineering discipline that predicts the future health of a system. In this research work, a data-driven approach for prognostics is proposed. Indeed, the present paper describes a data-driven hybrid model for the successful prediction of the remaining useful life of aircraft engines. The approach combines the multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) technique with the principal component analysis (PCA), dendrograms and classification and regression trees (CARTs). Elements extracted from sensor signals are used to train this hybrid model, representing different levels of health for aircraft engines. In this way, this hybrid algorithm is used to predict the trends of these elements. Based on this fitting, one can determine the future health state of a system and estimate its remaining useful life (RUL) with accuracy. To evaluate the proposed approach, a test was carried out using aircraft engine signals collected from physical sensors (temperature, pressure, speed, fuel flow, etc.). Simulation results show that the PCA-CART-MARS-based approach can forecast faults long before they occur and can predict the RUL. The proposed hybrid model presents as its main advantage the fact that it does not require information about the previous operation states of the input variables of the engine. The performance of this model was compared with those obtained by other benchmark models (multivariate linear regression and artificial neural networks) also applied in recent years for the modeling of remaining useful life. Therefore, the PCA-CART-MARS-based approach is very promising in the field of prognostics of the RUL for aircraft engines.

Batteries are one of the principal components in electric vehicles and mobile electronic devices. They operate based on electrochemical reactions, which are exhaustively tested to check their behavior and to determine their characteristics at each working point. One remarkable issue of batteries is their complex behavior. The power cell type under analysis in this research is a LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate LiFePO4). The purpose of this research is to predict the power cell State of Charge (SOC) by creating a hybrid intelligent model. All the operating points measured from a real system during a capacity confirmation test make up the dataset used to obtain the model. This dataset is clustered to obtain different behavior groups, which are used to develop the final model. Different regression techniques such as polynomial regression, support vector regression (SVR), and artificial neural networks (ANN) have been implemented for each cluster. A combination of these methods is performed to achieve an intelligent model. The SOC of the power cell can be predicted by this hybrid intelligent model, and good results are achieved.

Nowadays, data collection is a key process in the study of electrical power networks when searching for harmonics and a lack of balance among phases. In this context, the lack of data of any of the main electrical variables (phase-to-neutral voltage, phase-to-phase voltage, and current in each phase and power factor) adversely affects any time series study performed. When this occurs, a data imputation process must be accomplished in order to substitute the data that is missing for estimated values. This paper presents a novel missing data imputation method based on multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and compares it with the well-known technique called multivariate imputation by chained equations (MICE). The results obtained demonstrate how the proposed method outperforms the MICE algorithm.

This paper presents a new fault detection system in hypnotic sensors used for general anesthesia during surgery. Drug infusion during surgery is based on information received from patient monitoring devices; accordingly, faults in sensor devices can put patient safety at risk. Our research offers a solution to cope with these undesirable scenarios. We focus on the anesthesia process using intravenous propofol as the hypnotic drug and employing a Bispectral Index (BIS^TM) monitor to estimate the patient’s unconsciousness level. The method developed identifies BIS episodes affected by disturbances during surgery with null clinical value. Thus, the clinician—or the automatic controller—will not take those measures into account to calculate the drug dose. Our method compares the measured BIS signal with expected behavior predicted by the propofol dose provider and the electromyogram (EMG) signal. For the prediction of the BIS signal, a model based on a hybrid intelligent system architecture has been created. The model uses clustering combined with regression techniques. To validate its accuracy, a dataset taken during surgeries with general anesthesia was used. The proposed fault detection method for BIS sensor measures has also been verified using data from real cases. The obtained results prove the method’s effectiveness.