Patent ID: 7966152

Claim:
A method for automatically monitoring the performance of equipment, comprising the steps of: compiling current operating conditions of said equipment comprising at least one current sensor reading and at least one current performance measurement (PMc) associated with said current operating conditions; searching, using a computing system including non-transitory machine readable storage, a historical database comprising a plurality of stored operating conditions and at least one associated stored performance measure (PM*) that are stored in the non-transitory machine readable storage, each said stored operating conditions comprising at least one stored sensor reading wherein at least one similar operating condition is identified using distances between said current operating conditions and said plurality of stored operating conditions; fitting said stored performance measure (PM*) associated with said similar operating condition to generate a regression model; applying said regression model to said current operating conditions to generate an estimate for said performance measure for said current operating conditions (PMe); computing a first difference between said PMc and said PMe, and comparing said first difference to a predetermined threshold, wherein a warning is automatically generated if said first difference has a value greater than said predetermined threshold.