ABSTRACT
A fleet is a group of systems that are designed and manufactured the same way and are intended to be used the same way. For example, a fleet of delivery trucks may consist of 100 instances of a particular model of truck, each of which is intended for the same type of service—almost the same amount of time and distance driven every day, approximately the same total weight carried. One can begin with the assumption that each system in the fleet is comparable to a sample drawn from some distribution, so that all the systems in the fleet are independent and identically distributed. The chapter describes several systems that have been used to monitor fleets by analyzing numeric data and some other attempts at extracting useful information from text data, respectively. The key aspect of any data analysis method is how the input data were measured and transformed into information.
