Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68

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Neurocomputing
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neucom

Anomaly detection and predictive maintenance for photovoltaic

systems
Massimiliano De Benedetti a, Fabio Leonardi a, Fabrizio Messina a,∗, Corrado Santoro a,
Athanasios Vasilakos b
a
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Via S. sofia 64, Catania 95125, Italy
b
Lab of Networks and Cybersecurity, Innopolis University, 1, Universitetskaya Str., Innopolis 420500, Russia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: We present a learning approach designed to detect possible anomalies in photovoltaic (PV) systems in
Received 19 January 2018 order to let an operator to plan predictive maintenance interventions. The anomaly detection algorithm
Revised 27 April 2018
presented is based on the comparison between the measured and the predicted values of the AC power
Accepted 3 May 2018
production. The model designed to predict the AC power production is based on an Artificial Neural Net-
Available online 16 May 2018
work (ANN), that is capable of estimating the AC power production using solar irradiance and PV panel
Communicated by Dr. Yuan Yuan temperature measurements, and that is trained using a dataset previously gathered from the plant to
be monitored. Live trend data coming from the PV system are then compared with the output of the
Keywords:
Artificial neural networks model and the vector of residuals is analyzed to detect anomalies and generate daily predictive mainte-
Data analysis nance alerts; there residuals are aggregated over 1-day and processed to detect out-of-threshold samples
Anomaly detection and system degradation trends; these trends are extracted by computing the Triangular Moving Average
Alerting system (TMA) where the window size is automatically determined. The paper also reports experimental data re-
Predictive maintenance sults revealing that the model leads to a good anomaly detection rate, which is measured as a positive
Photovoltaic systems predictive detection rate greater than 90%. Moreover, the algorithm is able to recognize trends of system’s
deviations from normal operation behavior and generate predictive maintenance alerts as a decision sup-
port system for operatives, with the aim of avoiding possible incoming failures.
© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction 1.1. Motivation

The reduction of the costs of photovoltaic (PV) systems, the
trend of the market prices [1], along with the increment of per-
formances resulting from the improved cell efficiencies and lower
electrical conversion losses [2], has led to the grow of the interest
in such alternative energy production systems [3–6]. As a conse-
quence, the issues related to PV systems maintenance are gaining a
lot of attention, as proved by the studies and efforts (conducted by
various institutions and companies) that aim at developing “best
practices” for PV system operations [7]. Maintenance includes vari-
ous activities that are planned into a monitoring program that can
range from minimal checks (e.g., checking the total electricity gen-
erated as reported by the inverter once per year) to high-accuracy
monitoring that allows the manufacturer or the owner to identifies
problems or the need of cleaning operations. Maintenance will af-
fect the performance of the PV systems, in terms of efficiency and
generated power, and, as a consequence, the overall revenue.
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: messina@dmi.unict.it (F. Messina).
In this context, we are particularly interested in developing
techniques allowing to detect faults of PV components in a timely
manner. This aspect has got a fair attention in literature; in [8],
the authors developed a practical fault detection approach in PV
systems, intended for online implementation; a similar technique
is proposed in [9] for wind turbines. Both approaches seem to give
good results in terms of accuracy but they predict faults with a too
small anticipation time (one to five time units). Indeed, a desirable
property of any solution for predicting faults is represented by
the ability to provide accurate daily predictive maintenance alerts
in order to allow operators to take decisions in time and, as a
consequence, to plan maintenance tasks on field in advance. An al-
gorithm for anomaly detection and predictive maintenance would
be able to provide an accurate model for estimating electricity
production under normal operating conditions, which can be
employed to provide early detection of anomalies. Such anomalies
can be identified by analyzing power production samples that
show significant differences from those expected under certain
operating conditions, and the significance of the anomalies can

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2018.05.017
0925-2312/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
60 M. De Benedetti et al. / Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68
be computed as the deviation between the actual sample and the
forecasted value compared to the model accuracy index. In the
specific context of PV systems, predictive alerts shall be presented
several days before the incoming failure: in such a case, the opera-
tor can analyze the signal in order to take a proper decision and to
plan a number of technical and logistic operations related to the
needed maintenance activity. As a consequence, the PV system will
not under-perform for prolonged periods of time, and the power
losses caused by these anomalies and faults will be minimized.
1.2. Main contribution
In this work, we present a novel approach designed to detect
anomalies in PV systems and generate predictive maintenance
alerts. Our approach is capable to predict the faults in time
(i.e. some weeks before the fault will occur) to plan a number of
maintenance activities aimed at avoiding the possible loss of power
production. This is achieved by deriving a long term trends that
allow us to detect “degradation patterns” which identifies future
faults in a timely manner. The approach is based on computing the
numeric difference (in terms of residual vector) between power
production data coming from the real plant and the data estimated
by a model of the inverters developed ad hoc: the residual vector
is then processed by applying first autocorrelation and then a
Triangular Moving Average (TMA) in order to detect anomalies
and to identify hidden long term trends. The inverter model is
determined using an artificial neural network (ANN) trained with
historical data previously samples related to solar irradiance, tem-
perature and produced power. As it will be discussed later in this
paper, the application of these techniques allowed us to obtain
significant results in term of accuracy of the generated alerts,
which are presented several days before the incoming failures;
indeed, based on the experimental results we performed on a real
dataset, that are also reported in the paper, we have verified that
the AC power production model show a validation error of only
2.3%, and the predictive anomaly detection rate is larger than 90%.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reports a summary
of the main literature in the field. Section 3 provides an overview
of the proposed approach. Section 4 thoroughly describes the ANN
model development. Section 5 enters the anomaly’s predictive de-
tection. A number of experimental results, along with a numerical
example are illustrated in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 concludes
the paper.
2. Related work
The application of Artificial Intelligence for modeling and study-
ing photovoltaic systems has recently attracted a lot of interest.
For instance, in [10] the authors discuss the major artificial intelli-
gence (AI) techniques for photovoltaic applications: artificial neural
networks (ANNs), fuzzy logic (FL), genetic algorithm (GA), and hy-
brid systems (HSs), and analyzed the main advantages of AI-based
modeling and simulation techniques as alternatives to conventional
physical modeling are explained. They describe the application of
the different techniques of AI for modeling, prediction and fault
detection in some detail, and outline some conclusions. The anal-
ysis presented by the authors puts evidence on the fact that AI
offers a real alternative for prediction and fault identification sys-
tems.
As for anomalies and fault detection on PV systems, as well as
long-term prediction and performance measures, the related liter-
ature is fairly wise [11–25]. Overall, a few proposals in the litera-
ture deal with fault prediction on PV and eolic systems, and the
proposed algorithms differ on the nature of the processes and sig-
nals. Eolic systems are characterized mostly by the wind velocity
signal, which presents high daily variations, while PV systems are
mainly dependent by the solar radiation that has a slower dynam-
ics. Nevertheless, at the best of our knowledge there is no any solid
approach dealing with predictive maintenance of PV systems capa-
ble of providing predictive alerts several days in advance, therefore,
in the following paragraphs, we will refer to the works that have
some similarities with our approach.
Among the current literature, some proposals are based on
electrical-circuit simulations of a PV panel [26–28], while some
others rely on the statistical analysis of different PV system mea-
surements, as well as system efficiency values [29–31]. Some of
the existing predictive models for PV systems are capable to pre-
dict the production of electricity by means of a number of para-
metric models that use variables belonging to PV system and
weather, plus a number of adjustable parameters [32,33]. Some
others do use artificial intelligence techniques, such as neural net-
works, fuzzy logic, and expert systems [8,34–36].
Along the approaches cited before, we mention an interesting
fault detection approach presented in [8], which is intended only
for on-line implementation, developed and validated using data
measured from a real PV system. The model starts with a data
analysis aimed at identifying values not representative of a normal
PV system operation, then the original 10-min measurements are
averaged over 1 hour. The authors also developed different mod-
els for different irradiance ranges, in order to represent different
performance corresponding to different sunlight levels. The results
mainly reveal that the models for different irradiance intervals lead
to a fault detection rate greater than 90%. The fault detection is
simply based on the comparison between the measured and model
prediction results of the AC power production. The model, in turn,
estimates the AC power production using solar irradiance and PV
panel temperature measurements. The model present a fair degree
of complexity and a high accuracy in detecting faults even in pres-
ence of of some abnormalities on measured data. Nevertheless, the
fault detection approach in [8] predict faults by looking at the last
samples available. As a consequence, it does not allow the opera-
tor to predict the faults in time to plan a number of maintenance
activities aimed at avoiding the possible loss of power production
(e.g., some weeks before the fault will occur). Conversely, by our
approach, as we explain later in the paper, we derive a long term
trends that allow us to detect “degradation patterns” which iden-
tifies future faults in a timely manner.
In [36] the authors study the interesting problem of modeling a
power supply system by taking into account the various seasonal,
monthly and daily changes in meteorological data. They adopted
an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, called ANFIS, and a new
expert configuration PVPS system, that is a user aided design tool
for PV systems. In order to find suitable models for the different
components of the PVPS system (e.g., generator, battery and reg-
ulator) they used an extended database of measured climate data
(global radiation, temperature and humidity) as well as electrical
data (photovoltaic, battery and regulator voltage and current) of a
PVPS system installed in the south of Algeria. They obtained an
excellent level of accuracy and reliability and the correlation coef-
ficient between measured values and those estimated by the AN-
FIS has shown a good prediction accuracy of 98%. A very interest-
ing part of this related work is that the authors performed some
tests with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and those tests have
shown that the modeling technique developed by the authors is
able to perform better than the used ANN. Although in our work
the ANN represents only a first part of the whole process, as we
state in the conclusive section, we aim at integrating, in a future
work a different approach to model (and predict) the AC power
production.
In [11] the authors present a statistical approach for fault de-
tection and diagnosis in a PV system, with the goal of early detect
and identify faults on the DC side of a PV system as short-circuit,
 M. De Benedetti et al. / Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68 61

open-circuit and partial shading faults. An aspect similar to

our work is that the authors applied an exponentially-weighted
moving average (EWMA) control chart on the residuals obtained
from the one-diode model. One of the main motivation behind
the application of this technique is the low computational cost
that makes it easy to implement in real time. Authors validated
their approach by means of a dataset collected into a suitable
photovoltaic plant located in Algeria. In particular, as we discuss
later in this paper, we adopted the Triangular Moving Average
(TMA) in order to detect anomalies and to identify hidden long
term trends, as one of the final steps of our approach.
The study proposed in [37] discusses a particular fault detec-
tion algorithm based on the analysis of the theoretical curves de-
scribing the behaviour of an existing grid-connected photovoltaic
(GCPV) system. The authors simulated a number of attributes such
as voltage ratio (VR) and power ratio (PR) and, thereafter, they
used a third-order polynomial function to generate a couple of de-
tection limits for the VR and PR ratios. Samples of a given data
set that laid out of the detecting limits were processed by a fuzzy
logic classification system. The analysis of the obtained results has
proven the accuracy of the different faults occurring in the PV sys-
tem, in the order of 98.8%.
A further interesting approach is presented in [9], which deals
with the problem of detecting small and slowly developing faults
on wind turbines. One of the main differences lies in the context of
the application: indeed, if such faults are not detected (and fixed)
on time, they may cause severe damages to wind turbines with
severe consequences in terms of downtimes and costs, while a
small fault in PV systems will cause a decrease in performance and
overall productivity. In this critical context, the authors proposed a
method that combines an artificial neural network (ANN) and an
Exponentially-Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) to improve the
Fig. 1. Schema of the approach.
accuracy of detection of small faults: the ANN is used to predict
the output of wind turbine, and the EWMA is applied to moni-
tor the residuals between real and predicted values. Experimental intended to be executed in batch. We model a plant by means of
results on real data have shown that the proposed approach is ca- an artificial neural network; since the ANN must be trained, we
pable to catch about the 63.6% of the failures out of 77 occurred suppose that a certain amount of historical data is available; on
during wind turbine monitoring. The authors discuss the fact that this basis, since PV power production features a seasonal trend,
the performance measures (MSE and average run length) indicate one year of historical data suffices. The details of this first phase
that the proposed method can detect small faults in advance and are reported in Section 4.
improve the detection accuracy. Once the plant/inverter model has been developed, the second
We remark that most of the related works in the literature an- phase is the on-line analysis of sampled data in order to detected
alyze the model development phase, either through regression or the anomalies, a data-driven process that is sketched in Fig. 1 and
artificial intelligence techniques, with the aim of identifying rel- detailed in Section 5. The ANN is used to predict the inverter out-
evant deviations or anomalies, at the time they appear. Neverthe- put under normal conditions; the output is then used to compute
less, none of them deal with a long-term predictive problem, in or- daily residuals and values that exceed the normal operation limits
der to generate alerts in time, such that specialized operators will will result in warnings; the autocorrelation function is then used
be able to analyze them and schedule an intervention on site, with to find intrinsic periodicity of peaks, and the longest periodicity
either internal or external human resources. is treated as input parameter in order to calculate the Triangular
Moving Average (TMA) of the daily residuals, thus obtaining the
3. System model and overview of the approach related trend signal. TMA shows the long term trend of the daily
residuals, which could result in both areas of degradation or con-
he proposed approach aims at predicting the failures in the vergence, detected through its derivative function. Predictive alerts
system by detecting abnormalities, in PV system operations, be- are finally generated for those warnings that appear in correspon-
fore they cause severe damages. Here we refer to state-of-the-art dence of positive values of the trend derivative.
photovoltaic power production plants featured by a certain num-
ber of PV panel strings connected to suitable DC/AC inverters. We 4. Model development
consider that the plant is provided with a suitable data collec-
tion system, able to sample and store data relevant to solar irra- As discussed in the previous section, the first phase of the ap-
diance (pyranometer), temperature and generated AC power. As for proach is the development of a model to predict the AC power pro-
data sampling, the only requirement is a sampling interval that is duction of the PV system. In principle, the overall produced power
enough to have adequate data for a 1-hour average (indeed, we could be modeled as a linear function of the solar irradiance, as the
consider a sampling time of 5 min). plot in Fig. 2 suggests, which shows a trend obtained from data sam-
The approach is based on two different phases. In the first pled in a real production plant. Nevertheless, the relation between so-
phase, the model of the plant/inverter to be monitored has to be lar irradiance and produced power is also affected by the temperature
developed, based on historical stored data; therefore this phase is of the photovoltaic cells that is tied to the environment temperature,
62 M. De Benedetti et al. / Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68
Fig. 2. Hourly dataset – inverter active power vs radiation.
Fig. 3. Representation of ANN used to model power production.
therefore a linear model would represent a very simple and inaccu-
rate approach to approximate the real function which, indeed, features
some non-linearities that require a proper modeling approach.
4.1. Plant model and data pre-processing
A Photovoltaic system can be modeled by the following generic
function:
P = f (I, T ) (1)
where P is the power produced in kW, I is the solar irradiance in
W
m2
and T is the environment temperature in °C.
To derive a usable form of function (1), a typical approach con-
sists in the adoption of an artificial neural network, as a first step
of a more complex approach which is capable to “learn” – from the
available dataset – the non-linear nature of the system. For this
reason, in our system, we employ an ANN made of a Multi-layer
Perceptron (MLP) [38] with two inputs, I and T, and one output, P,
as in Fig. 3.
In order to train the network, a dataset coming from a real
power production plant must be used (as we did in our experi-
ments, as Section 6 reports); the set has to be however properly
filtered in order to remove invalid data that could affect the predic-
tive model. Indeed, the development of a reliable model requires,
at the beginning, a consistent training dataset: the available data
samples that are being used for the training dataset should contain
and represent all the seasonality i.e. at least 1 year of flat data.1
A pre-processing operation has to be done on the available data
set in order to ensure that all data are valid. Indeed, in some cases,
data could present situations in which power output is near zero
but the irradiance is slightly greater than zero; such conditions,
which are highlighted in Fig. 2 with the red oval, refer to events,
like plant maintenance or plant failure, in which the inverters are
“off”: since this data patterns do not refer to normal operative con-
ditions, they must be removed. In this filtering operation, also data
identifying patterns related to very low sunlight levels (low irra-
diance and zero output power) should be removed, for which the
measurements accuracy is significantly reduced.
1
Here we consider an acquisition system robust enough to not present sensi-
ble “data-missing holes”; in the opposite case, more than 1 year of data could be
required to obtain a good model.
We also consider a second pre-processing operation by averag-
ing data over 1 hour: indeed, in PV systems data is often sampled
with a smaller period, in the order of 1–10 min, but, with that
sampling time, data could feature a high variance; averaging over
1 hour can thus decrease the variability in the dataset and con-
tribute to improve the accuracy of the model constructed. Com-
puting average over a certain time window represents an opera-
tion that enables to keep track of the core variance in the daily
solar process, dealing with slow variation signals such as the so-
lar radiance. It is possible to consider time windows different than
1 hour for this averaging step, but we should take into account, as
a general comment, that the higher the time window, the higher
the probability to lose relevant information within data. Vice versa,
a small time window used in the calculation of mean will result in
complications in determining after the related long-term trend.
4.2. ANN training and structure
In order to obtain a MLP-ANN good enough to model a process,
we must determine the number hidden layers as well as the op-
timal number of neurons. As for the number of hidden layers, it
is widely known that using more than one layer in a MLP does
not provide significant advances but, on the contrary increments
processing time and complexity; for this reason we used only one
hidden layer. On the other hand, to determine the needed number
of neurons that would provide a good accuracy, we adopted a “trial
and error” process (which is a widely accepted approach) aimed at
training and test several network structures and then analyzing the
residual vectors.
On this basis, we divided the data obtained at the end of the
filtering phase into a training set and a validation set. Since the
model is specifically tuned to fit the training data, we also verified
whether the developed model suffered of over-fitting, which may
occur when a model performs very well on the training dataset
but, on the other hand, is not able to generalize from the data
trend and performs poorly on fresh data.
The validation is performed by analyzing the Coefficient of Vari-
ation of the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) computed on the set
of observations. On this basis, we tried a range of values from 1
to 50 for the number of neurons in the hidden layer and mea-
sured validation error, then we selected the case corresponding to
the smallest variation. By using the dataset in Section 6, we found
 M. De Benedetti et al. / Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68
Fig. 4. Hourly residual vector.
that using a maximum number of 10 neurons is appropriate, as
the evolution of the validation error indicated that model starts to
over-fit when the size of the hidden layer overcounts 10 neurons.
The calculated RMSE on the validation dataset was 11,4 KW over
a 500 KW inverter, which represents a ratio of 2,3% for the RMSE
normalized w.r.t. the maximum value of the AC power values.
It should be noticed that the resulting ANN must be considered
valid for that production plant: even if the forms of function (1) are
quite similar when various plants are considered, if a new PV sys-
tem needs to be monitored, the relevant ANN must be developed
and trained, using the approach reported before, in order to let the
fault-prediction system work well.
5. Anomaly detection and predictive alerts through residuals
control
In this Section, we show the details of the algorithm for
anomaly detection and generation of predictive alerts. As Fig. 1 de-
picts, the approach is based on the analysis of the vector of resid-
uals, computed by determining the difference between the output
of the ANN model and the live data coming from the plant. Since
the algorithm is designed to detect a trend, an adequate amount
of data has to be accumulated; to this aim, a data series in a time
window is considered, the series is continuously updated on the
basis of live data: each time a new data is sampled from the plant,
the oldest data in the series is removed, the series is then used to
compute the vector of residuals that is passed to the other data
analysis blocks, which are described in the following.
5.1. Computing daily residuals
The first operation made on the vector of residuals is a per-
day aggregation. In general, PV data are sampled with a periodicity
that is in the order of minutes and, for our analysis, as reported
in Section 3, a per-hour aggregation is needed. However, while a
1-hour basis aggregation is required to develop a good model of
plant, such a resulting dataset still contains too much values for a
trend-based anomaly detection: indeed, since our analysis is based
on finding data trends that evolves with a very low frequency (or-
der of days), a 1-hour aggregation contains high frequencies that
are not only useless for the analysis but could also affect valid-
ity. For this reason, starting from the 1-hour vector of residuals,
we compute the daily vector by considering the cumulative value
of the absolute hourly residuals in a day. The new data series thus
contains a value for each day that is the sum of the absolute values
of all the residuals of that day.
Figs. 4 and 5 show the data before and after this aggrega-
tion process; Fig. 4 reports the hourly trend of residuals while
Fig. 5 plots the output of the daily-cumulative operation: we can
observe that high frequencies are removed but the overall trend of
data is still maintained.
63
Daily residuals, once computed, follow two different data pro-
cessing paths (see Fig. 1): on one hand, a threshold is applied to
detect “out of normal operation” conditions that are used to create
warnings; on the other hand, a long-term analysis is performed
to find possible degradation, i.e. areas with increasing deviations
of residuals over time. The results of these two paths are then
merged and filtered in order to generate predictive alerts. The de-
tails of this process are described in the following subsections.
5.2. Determining normal operation limits
A normal operational condition implies that the behavior of the
plant does not differ too much from the predicted one and thus
features low values in the vector of residuals. On this basis, we
can fix some thresholds and generate a warning when a value, in
the daily residuals, overcome such thresholds.
To determine the thresholds, we start from the RMSE computed
during the ANN validation (see Section 4.2); such a RMSE repre-
sents the standard deviation of the normal operation AC Power
Model and, since the model has been developed by leveraging on
the hourly dataset, we can denote it as σ h . We define two thresh-
olds, Hourly Lower Limit (HLL) and Hourly Upper Limit (HUL) as:
HLL = 3σh HUL = 5σh
Samples that exceed HLL but are lower than HUL represents an ab-
normal behavior of the PV system, while samples that exceed HUL
are representative of strong anomalies with a good level of confi-
dence. To determine the numerical values of HLL and HUL we can
observe that, according to [39], when data is featured by a normal
(Gaussian) distribution, about 99.7% of the data points lie within
3σ h , while about 99.9999% of the data points lie within 5σ h . Fur-
thermore, according to the Chebyshev’s Theorem [39], even if the
data does not follow a normal distribution, at least 88.9% of the
observations falls within 3σ h . For these reasons, 3σ h and 5σ h rep-
resents reasonable values for HLL and HUL, respectively.
The threshold values are determined starting from the RMSE of
ANN validation that is performed using hourly values, but, as re-
ported in the previous subsection, anomaly detection is performed
using daily cumulative residuals. On this basis, starting from HLL
and HUL we should determine two equivalent thresholds to be ap-
plied to daily data. We empirically define a daily-equivalent stan-
dard deviation index σd = K σh to be used for the definition of Daily
Lower Limit (DLL) and Daily Upper Limit (DUL), which are expressed
as:
σd = K σh
DLL = 3σd = 3(K σh )
DUL = 5σd = 5(K σh )
Clearly, the choice of K has an impact on the accuracy of predictive
alerts generated by the system. Indeed, the lower the K factor, the
lower the daily normal operation limits, the higher the probability
64 M. De Benedetti et al. / Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68
Fig. 5. Daily residual vector.
Fig. 6. Normal operation limits on daily residuals.
to obtain daily residuals exceeding that limits, which will result
in a larger number of warnings and, as a consequence, the prob-
ability that some of them will be false positive will increase. Vice
versa, the higher is the K, the higher the daily normal operation
limits, the lower the probability to have daily residuals exceeding
that limits, which will increase the probability of losing informa-
tion potentially related to a real anomaly. Moreover, in any PV sys-
tem, during the different hours of the day, the amount of power
production will be different due to several different factors as, e.g.,
the variation in the intensity of the Sun’s radiation during the day,
the variations in the length of the day, the angle of incidence of
the Sun’s rays with the ground, increasing during the day from a
very low value at dawn as the Sun rises to a peak at noon and
falling again as the Sun sets. Similarly the insolation will show low
values at high latitudes due to the effect of the different air mass
density.
In particular, the values of ESH (Equivalent Sun Hours) vary from
3 to 5 equivalent hours, therefore, by taking into account this as-
pect, we selected K = 4 in order to get a daily equivalent standard
deviation starting from the hourly standard deviation σ h .
On this basis, we apply DLL and DUL thresholds to daily resid-
uals and generate warnings by using a function that outputs a nu-
meric value as follows:
• samples below DLL represent a normal operation, so the output
value is 0;
• samples between DLL and DUL are considered as possible
anomalies, here the output value is 0.5;
• samples greater than DUL are considered indications of strong
anomalies, so they take as output the value 1.
Fig. 7 shows the different levels of warnings generated from the
daily residual vector in Fig. 5.
5.3. Determining residual trends
In order to improve the accuracy in the recognition of abnor-
mal behaviors, warnings generated in the previous step must be
further processed, thus reducing the probability of generating false
positive and helping to better compute the predictive maintenance
alerts. The control quality criteria, in this case, is based on ex-
tracting the trend in the daily residuals and combining such trends
with warnings.
The process to extract the trend in daily residuals is based
on filtering the data by applying a Triangular Moving Average
(TMA) [39]. The main parameter to be set for the TMA is the win-
dow size to be considered in the computation of the average which
can be determined by finding periodicity in residuals. To this aim,
we apply a classical data processing algorithm that exploits the au-
tocorrelation function as explained below:
• the output of autocorrelation function (see Fig. 8) is analyzed
in order to find “peaks” (i.e. local maximum); these points cor-
respond to short-time periods;
• the time values corresponding to short-time periods are aver-
aged and a short-time period average (SPA) is computed;
• the next step is to find long-time periods; to this aim all peaks
featuring an autocorrelation value grater than 0.3 are first ex-
tracted and, from this set, only the points whose time differ-
ence is greater than SPA are considered;
• time values of the resulting set are average thus computing the
long-time period average (LPA); the window size of the TMA is
thus set to 2LPA.
As it is reported in Section 6, using our experimental data we
found a LPA of 19 days and set the window size of TMA to 38 days.
The residual trend computed with the TMA is therefore reported in
Fig. 9.
5.4. Predictive alerts creation
The last step of the data analysis process deals with the cre-
ation of predictive alerts; this is performed by finding areas of
degradation or convergence related to the inverter normal behav-
ior by computing the derivative of the trend signal. Positive val-
ues of the derivatives samples correspond to degradation areas
 M. De Benedetti et al. / Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68 65

Fig. 7. Daily residual vector.

Fig. 8. Autocorrelation of daily residuals Vector.

Fig. 9. Normalized Daily residuals vector and long term trend.

(residuals trend tend to upper values) while negative values are
related to normal behavior or convergence. Residual warnings are
thus checked against derivative samples and predictive maintenance
alerts are generated only for those residuals warnings appearing
in correspondence of positive values of the trend derivative. The
trend comes from a processing that uses a time window—the Tri-
angular Moving Average—the size of the window used in this step
corresponds to the relative alert anticipation; since, according to
our experiments, the windows size in general in the order of one
month (38 days in our experiments, see Section 6), we can state
that the data processing chain described is able to provide pre-
dictive alter with a high anticipation, thus allowing maintainers to
decide whether planning proper actions.
5.5. Alert utilization and decision making
The data analysis process described above has the objective of
identifying a degradation of performances that could led to an im-
minent fault; the use of the conditional, in this case, is mandatory
because we must bear in mind that the presence of an alert does
not automatically imply that a fault is going to occur. The idea be-
hind our proposal is to provide operators with a “warning lamp”,
in their control room, meaning that a system is featuring a be-
havior that is slightly different than the normal one, but it’s up
to the operators themselves to decide whether or not to plan a
maintenance intervention on the plant; for this reason, the analy-
sis described in this paper has to be intended as an additional sup-
port for decision making. As an example, an operator, on the basis
of her/his experience, can decide to perform a maintenance action
when a certain number of consecutive warnings are reported; this
specific number can be set on the basis of some factors like past
warnings and their relationships with occurred faults, age of PV
panels or inverters of the plant, etc., but, in any case, its choice is
finally tied to a human decision.
6. Simulation and experimental results
In order to test the proposed solution and to collect the ex-
perimental results, we implemented the algorithm by means of a
number of Matlab functions and scripts [40]. We briefly discuss
66 M. De Benedetti et al. / Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68

Fig. 10. Daily Residuals warnings, Daily Residual trend, Daily Predictive Alerts.

Fig. 11. Registered faults, Predictive positive alerts, False positive alerts.

here the computational complexity of the proposed solution; the Table 1

Sample of collected data.
interested reader may find more details about the software in
the supplementary material, which includes a simplified version TimeStamp Inv_A1-Active Met1 radiation Met1 module
of the procedures correspondent to every computational phases power avg [kW] (pyranometer) temperature
avg [W/m2] avg [C]
illustrated into the Fig. 1. The implementation has been used to
perform a series of experiments on a real dataset and the results 1/1/2015 7:30 0.0 0 01886598 0.3815842867 2.6353769302
we obtained are reported in the following. 1/1/2015 7:35 0.0610818677 1.3595483303 2.5940611362
1/1/2015 7:40 0.0382286347 2.2702567577 2.5262842178
As for the dataset, we used historical data collected from a
1/1/2015 7:45 0.0731724724 3.61191535 2.4704217911
ground-mounted PV plant located in Akropotamos, Greece. The 1/1/2015 7:50 0.0056160204 5.0770974159 2.438030 0 045
system has a nominal capacity of 6.22 MW, generated by 20,384 1/1/2015 7:55 1.4125183821 8.0398168564 2.3655948639
SHARP modules of 125 Wp and 30,628 SHARP modules of 120 1/1/2015 8:00 3.849619627 12.8972492218 2.3292591572
1/1/2015 8:05 5.4008703232 17.5688610077 2.3057751656
Wp connected to 13 FIMER inverters with a rated power output of
1/1/2015 8:10 6.9009132385 21.4069633484 2.2752606869
500-kW AC. As a reference, Table 1 reports a snap of the collected 1/1/2015 8:15 8.0641679764 25.2157459259 2.2615573406
dataset. 1/1/2015 8:20 9.4087839127 29.904001236 2.2365436554
Measurements are recorded every 5 min, covering the period 1/1/2015 8:25 8.8424167633 35.2242164612 2.250962019
from January 01, 2015 to December 31, 2016, that is 731 days. 1/1/2015 8:30 9.1357841492 37.8326911926 2.2370893955
1/1/2015 8:35 10.3381958008 40.2881011963 2.2404639721
Collected data includes AC inverter active power output (second
column), the pyranometer solar irradiance (third column) and the
module temperature (fourth column). To develop the ANN-based
model, we used the 70% of the dataset as training set, while the
of predictive alerts is detected consecutively within a certain time
remaining 30% has been exploited as validation set. We then run
window. As windows size, we chose 19 days, meaning that we con-
the prediction alert algorithm by using the overall dataset and, as
sider the presence of a number of alerts in at least half of sam-
a result, the algorithm generated a total amount of 109 daily pre-
ples in the time window determined for the TMA. On this basis, as
dictive alerts that are reported in Fig. 11.
Fig. 11 shows, the number of possible fault warnings detected has
As the Figure shows, some alerts are simple spots occurring
been 13, while the predictive alerts that did not pass the 19-days
only one day, others feature a persistence that lasts some days. In
persistence filter (and that we named as “false positive”) are a to-
order to derive a possible “rule-of-thumb” that could drive an op-
tal of 24. Since the total (real) registered faults are 14, we can state
erator to understand the imminent occurrence of a possible fault,
that the algorithm has been able to correctly predict faults with a
we analyzed the daily predictive alerts against real plant faults
detection rate greater than 90%.
that are registered in the dataset. To this aim, we computed pos-
The implementation gave us also the possibility to understand
sible fault warnings: a possible fault warning occurs when a group
the computational complexity of the algorithm that is useful to
 M. De Benedetti et al. / Neurocomputing 310 (2018) 59–68
evaluate the cost of the proposed approach. In particular, as shown
in the supplementary material, all the functions implemented for
each computational blocks of Fig. 1 have a complexity that is linear
with the input size. Overall, we say that the complexity of these
function is O(n), where n represents the input size of the functions.
In particular:
• The computation of the 1 hour average, the computation of the
daily residuals leads to a number of single loops with a number
of iterations proportional to the number of the data set rows.
• Similarly, it can be shown that the computation of the equiva-
lent daily RMSE as well as the setting of a vector of warnings
for out of normal operation limits residuals has linear complex-
ity on the input size, as it involves a sequence of single of not
nested loops that include a few simple operations.
• A similar analysis holds for the phases correspondent to the
computation of autocorrelation [41], for which we used the
Matlab function xcorr(). In this case, the complexity is propor-
tional to the size of the input vector (say n), then O(n). Simi-
larly, the complexity related to the process of finding the pe-
riodicity and the application of the triangular moving average
(TMA) to find degradation trends is still linear with the input
size.
• Finally, as it is reported in [42], the complexity related to the
computation performed by the ANN is represented by a con-
stant value equal to the number of neurons of the hidden layer.
7. Discussion and conclusions
Hourly averages of the measurements should be used for PV in-
verter models implementation, since the AC power models devel-
oped using hourly averages are more accurate than the models de-
veloped using 10-min measurements and because of the slow in-
trinsic dynamic of the solar signals. The main requirement of this
study was to develop an anomaly detection system and predic-
tive maintenance model with a relatively low degree of complexity
and able to provide daily predictive alerts to operators to support
the maintenance decision process. The novelty of our approach is
represented by the fact that it is designed to detect anomalies in
PV systems and generate predictive maintenance alerts. A a conse-
quence, it is capable to predict the faults in time (e.g., some weeks
before the fault will occur) to plan a number of maintenance ac-
tivities aimed at avoiding the possible loss of power production.
As we explained in the paper, this is achieved by deriving a long
term trends that allow us to detect “degradation patterns” which
identifies future faults in a timely manner.
Despite the low complexity of the AC power production model,
the predictive accuracy is quite high: the model has a validation
error of 2.3% and the predictive anomaly detection rate is better
than 90%, considering predictive alert presented several days be-
fore the incoming failures.
We think that the main limitation of the developed approach is
that, in the current version, it relies on a single model for all the
data. Indeed, there are different windows of irradiance and sea-
sonality for which the process presents different resolutions. As a
consequence, we aim at measuring and comparing – in a future
work – the current model accuracy with that obtained by splitting
the model itself in various sub-models that deal with the different
windows of irradiance or seasonality. The anomaly detection algo-
rithm and predictive model is valid for all PV systems since the
data cleaning process is automated and able to identify observa-
tions not representative of a normal PV system operation.
Future work may also include the development of fault classifi-
cation rules, once the model is implemented on-line and its accu-
racy and robustness is validated. The specific causes of the faults
would be identified, providing operators with valuable information
67
regarding the required corrective actions leveraging on the busi-
ness knowledge base moving toward the “so cold” prescriptive an-
alytics.
Acknowledgment
This study has been conducted thanks to the Enel Foundation
Fellowship program.
Supplementary material
Supplementary material associated with this article can be
found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.neucom.2018.05.017.
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Massimiliano De Benedetti received a Master degree in
Electronic engineering with specialization in Automation
and Control of Complex Systems in 2010. He started his
career in E-Distribuzione, the Italian DSO (Distribution
System Operator) in 2011, working on the development
of web/mobile applications and services for the manage-
ment and monitoring of medium voltage network criti-
cal failure events. In 2013 he was one of the winner of
the first ISSNAF International Internship at Vision-Lab of
UCL A in Los Angeles where he worked on VisioInertial
Navigation systems for Robotics applications, and in 2014
he contributed to an open-data systems R&D for an euro-
pean research project (PRISMA). Since 2016 he has been
working in the renewable energy sector for Enel Green Power, Innovation and Sus-
tainability energy storage unit, working on control and aggregation strategies for
energy stora ge systems based on machine learning algorithms, software platform
architecture for DER (Distributed Energy Resources) management and optimization,
Blockchain technology applications, microgrids controller and smart metering sys-
tems. From December 2016 he has been selected as Fellow of Enel Foundation, lead-
ing research project in the technology sector focused on Big Data, Robot Coopera-
tion and Artificial Intelligence. In 2014 he started his Ph.D. in Computer Science at
the University of Catania. He is mainly involved in research activities about Dis-
tributed Software Architectures, Robot cooperation, Computer Vision and Machine
Learning for Robotics applications. Contact him at m.debenedetti@dmi.unict.it
Fabio Leonardi holds a Master degree in Electronic en-
gineering with specialization in Automation and Control
of Complex Systems. He started his career in the research
sector at I.N.F.N. (National Institute for Nuclear Physics)
involved in the development of control boards and soft-
ware systems for Data Acquisition and real time monitor-
ing of signals acquired from hundreds of underwater op-
tical and acoustic sensors. Hired by E-Distribuzione, the
Italian DSO (Distribution System Operator) in 2010, he en-
tered the energy distribution sector, managing develop-
ment projects of the MV/LV electrical grid, analysing and
supervising the energy flow utilising Data remotely ac-
quired and ingested into a control and monitoring sys-
tem as well as supporting the implementation of distributed innovative sensors
for smart grid projects. Since 2014 he has been working in the renewable energy
sector, for Enel Green Power, as member of the Global Control and Monitoring sys-
tems unit, managing projects on SCADA systems, Control and Monitoring Rooms
development at worldwide level, design and implementation of Big Data analytics
infrastructure. In 2016 he started his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University
of Catania, dealing with Machine Learning techniques and Predictive Maintenance
algorithms supported by a Big Data infrastructure. From December 2016 he has
been selected as Research Fellow of Enel Foundation, leading research projects in
the technology sector, with focus on Big Data, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.
Contact him at fabio.leonardi@unict.it
F. Messina received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from
the Department of Mathematics and Informatics of the
University of Catania, Italy in 2009. He is currently work-
ing as assistant professor in the same department. His
research interest includes Distributed systems, Complex
Systems, Simulation systems, trust and recommender sys-
tems.
C. Santoro received the Laurea degree in Computer En-
gineering from the University of Catania in 1997, and
the Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of
Palermo in 2001. Presently, he is a researcher at the De-
partment of Mathematics and Informatics of the Univer-
sity of Catania. His research interests include large scale
distributed systems, intelligent autonomous systems and
robotics. Contact him at santoro@dmi.unict.it
Athanasios V. Vasilakos received the Ph.D. degree in
computer science and engineering from the University
of Patras, Patras, Greece. He is a Professor with Innop-
olis University, Innopolis, Russia. Dr. Vasilakos served
or is serving as an Editor for several technical jour-
nals, such as the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORK
AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS
ON CLOUD COMPUTING, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IN-
FORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, the IEEE TRANS-
ACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
NANOBIOSCIENCE the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMA-
TION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE, the ACM Transac-
tions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, the IEEE
JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS. He is also the General Chair
of the European Alliances for Innovation.