Association rules extraction for the identification of functional dependencies in complex technical infrastructures

This work proposes a method for identifying functional dependencies among components of complex technical infrastructures using databases of alarm messages. The developed method is based on the representation of the alarm database by a binary matrix, the use of the Apriori algorithm for mining association rules and a new algorithm for identifying groups of functionally dependent components. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by means of its application to an artificial case study and a real large-scale database of alarms generated by different supervision systems of the complex technical infrastructure of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).