CARE to Compare: A Real-World Benchmark Dataset for Early Fault Detection in Wind Turbine Data

Early fault detection plays a crucial role in the field of predictive maintenance for wind turbines, yet the comparison of different algorithms poses a difficult task because domain-specific public datasets are scarce. Many comparisons of different approaches either use benchmarks composed of data from many different domains, inaccessible data, or one of the few publicly available datasets that lack detailed information about the faults. Moreover, many publications highlight a couple of case studies where fault detection was successful. With this paper, we publish a high quality dataset that contains data from 36 wind turbines across 3 different wind farms as well as the most detailed fault information of any public wind turbine dataset as far as we know. The new dataset contains 89 years worth of real-world operating data of wind turbines, distributed across 44 labeled time frames for anomalies that led up to faults, as well as 51 time series representing normal behavior. Additionally, the quality of training data is ensured by turbine-status-based labels for each data point. Furthermore, we propose a new scoring method, called CARE (Coverage, Accuracy, Reliability and Earliness), which takes advantage of the information depth that is present in the dataset to identify good early fault detection models for wind turbines. This score considers the anomaly detection performance, the ability to recognize normal behavior properly, and the capability to raise as few false alarms as possible while simultaneously detecting anomalies early.