Detecting and classifying abnormal system states is critical for condition monitoring, but supervised methods often fall short due to the rarity of anomalies and the lack of labeled data. Therefore, clustering is often used to group similar abnormal behavior. However, evaluating cluster quality without ground truth is challenging, as existing measures such as the Silhouette Score (SSC) only evaluate the cohesion and separation of clusters and ignore possible prior knowledge about the data. To address this challenge, we introduce the Synchronized Anomaly Agreement Index (SAAI), which exploits the synchronicity of anomalies across multivariate time series to assess cluster quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SAAI by showing that maximizing SAAI improves accuracy on the task of finding the true number of anomaly classes K in correlated time series by 0.23 compared to SSC and by 0.32 compared to X-Means. We also show that clusters obtained by maximizing SAAI are easier to interpret compared to SSC.

Bio-regenerative Life Support Systems (BLSSs) are artificial ecosystems that consist of multiple symbiotic relationships. BLSSs are crucial for sustaining long-duration space missions by facilitating food production and managing essential material cycles for respiratory air, water, biomass, and waste. The EDEN NEXT GEN Project, part of the EDEN roadmap at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), aims to develop a fully integrated ground demonstrator of a BLSS comprising all subsystems, with the ultimate goal of realizing a flight-ready BLSS within the next decade. This initiative builds upon insights from the EDEN ISS project, which investigated controlled environment agriculture (CEA) technologies for space exploration. EDEN ISS, a near-closed-loop research greenhouse deployed in Antarctica from 2017 to 2021, focused on crop production, including lettuces, bell peppers, leafy greens, and various herbs. To ensure the safe and stable operation of BLSSs, we explore methods to mitigate risks regarding system health, particularly regarding food production and nourishment shortages for isolated crews.