One place this data mining begins is when the company's mechanics plug in information from a truck that has failed in some way and compare its performance to that of every other vehicle it owns of the same make and year. The idea is to look for precursors in the data from the sensors of the broken down truck and compare them to data from the same sensors in the other vehicles. By identifying what was different in the data in the failed vehicle from the others, it may be possible to identify a precursor to a maintenance problem that can be searched for in the data that's coming in from the rest of the identical members of the fleet.

via UPS turns data analysis into big savings | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.