A deep auto-encoder satellite anomaly advance warning framework

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to ensure the stable operation of satellites in orbit and to assist ground personnel in continuously monitoring the satellite telemetry data and finding anomalies in advance, which can improve the reliability of satellite operation and prevent catastrophic losses.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a deep auto-encoder (DAE) satellite anomaly advance warning framework for satellite telemetry data. Firstly, this study performs grey correlation analysis, extracts important feature attributes to construct feature vectors and builds the variational auto-encoder with bidirectional long short-term memory generative adversarial network discriminator (VAE/BLGAN). Then, the Mahalanobis distance is used to measure the reconstruction score of input and output. According to the periodic characteristic of satellite operation, a dynamic threshold method based on periodic time window is proposed. Satellite health monitoring and advance warning are achieved using reconstruction scores and dynamic thresholds.

Findings

Experiment results indicate DAE methods can probe that satellite telemetry data appear abnormal, trigger a warning before the anomaly occurring and thus allow enough time for troubleshooting. This paper further verifies that the proposed VAE/BLGAN model has stronger data learning ability than other two auto-encoder models and is sensitive to satellite monitoring data.

Originality/value

This paper provides a DAE framework to apply in the field of satellite health monitoring and anomaly advance warning. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to combine DAE methods with satellite anomaly detection, which can promote the application of artificial intelligence in spacecraft health monitoring.

Citation

Chen, J., Zhao, X. and Pi, D. (2021), "A deep auto-encoder satellite anomaly advance warning framework", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 93 No. 6, pp. 1085-1096. https://doi.org/10.1108/AEAT-09-2019-0185