Predicting Remaining Useful Life using Time Series Embeddings based on Recurrent Neural Networks

We consider the problem of estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of a system or a machine from sensor data. Many approaches for RUL estimation based on sensor data make assumptions about how machines degrade. Additionally, sensor data from machines is noisy and often suffers from missing values in many practical settings. We propose Embed-RUL: a novel approach for RUL estimation from sensor data that does not rely on any degradation-trend assumptions, is robust to noise, and handles missing values. Embed-RUL utilizes a sequence-to-sequence model based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to generate embeddings for multivariate time series subsequences. The embeddings for normal and degraded machines tend to be different, and are therefore found to be useful for RUL estimation. We show that the embeddings capture the overall pattern in the time series while filtering out the noise, so that the embeddings of two machines with similar operational behavior are close to each other, even when their sensor readings have significant and varying levels of noise content. We perform experiments on publicly available turbofan engine dataset and a proprietary real-world dataset, and demonstrate that Embed-RUL outperforms the previously reported state-of-the-art on several metrics.Comment: Presented at 2nd ML for PHM Workshop at SIGKDD 2017, Halifax, Canad

Data-Efficient Estimation of Remaining Useful Life for Machinery with a Limited Number of Run-to-Failure Training Sequences

Prognostics and Health Monitoring (PHM) of machinery is a research area with great relevance to industrial applications as it can serve as a foundation for safer, more cost-efficient operation and maintenance. The prediction of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) plays an important part in this field and has seen significant advances from the introduction of machine learning methods. However, these methods typically require model training with a large number of run-to-failure sequences, which are often not feasible to obtain due to the required time and cost investments. The present study addresses this issue by introducing a novel methodology, which first quantifies the deviation from the machine’s health and fault state and then calculates a machine Health Index (HI) prior to the prediction of RUL. In addition, the start of a degradation state is determined. Alternative implementations of the proposed methodology are compared utilising several methods, including Support Vector Regression (SVR), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Network (NN), Mahalanobis Distance (MD), and LSTM Autoencoder (AE) NN. The methodology is applied to the open turbofan degradation (C-MAPSS) and bearing vibration (FEMTO-ST PROGNOSTIA) datasets. When a reduced subset of training sequences is used, the prediction results demonstrate that the proposed methodology largely outperforms the baseline method without HI generation. For example, when comparing prediction errors of the C-MAPSS dataset at a reduction of the available number of training sequences to 5%, the proposed method shows an average prediction improvement by 6.5% - 19.2% relative to the baseline method. The presented approach is therefore suitable to improve model generalisation for cases with a limited number of training sequences. When the full training set is utilised, the most resource-saving variant of the proposed approach achieves an average training duration of 8.9% compared to the baseline method. Hence, an additional contribution of the presented data-efficient approach is the reduction of required computing resources, which has implications on training time, energy consumption, and environmental impact.10.13039/501100000266-Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

A Deep Learning Approach to Prognostics of Rolling Element Bearings

The use of deep learning approaches for prognostics and remaining useful life predictions have become obviously prevalent. Artificial recurrent neural networks like the long short-term memory are popularly employed for forecasting, prognostics and health management practices, and in other fields of life. As an unsupervised learning approach, the efficiency of the long short-term memory for time-series predictive purposes is quite remarkable in contrast to standard feedforward neural networks. Virtually all mechanical systems consist mostly of rotating components which are by nature, prone to degradation/failure from known and uncertain causes. As a result, condition monitoring of these rolling element bearings is necessary in order to carry out prognostics and make necessary life predictions which guide safe and cost-effective decision making. Several studies have been conducted on effective approaches and methods for accurate prognostics of rolling element bearings; however, this paper presents a case study on rolling element bearing prognostics and degradation performance using an LSTM model

Operational modal analysis and prediction of remaining useful life for rotating machinery

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe significance of rotating machinery spans areas from household items to vital industry sectors, such as aerospace, automotive, railway, sea transport, resource extraction, and manufacturing. Hence, our technologised society depends on efficient and reliable operation of rotating machinery. To contribute to this aim, this thesis leverages measurable quantities during its operation for structural-mechanical evaluation employing Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) and the prediction of Remaining Useful Life (RUL). Modal parameters determined by OMA are central for the design, test, and validation of rotating machinery. This thesis introduces the first open parametric simulation dataset of rotating machinery during an acceleration run. As there is a lack of similar open datasets suitable for OMA, it lays a foundation for improved reproducibility and comparability of future research. Based on this, the Averaged Order-Based Modal Analysis (AOBMA) method is developed. The novel addition of scaling and weighted averaging of individual machine orders in AOBMA alleviates the analysis effort of the existing Order-Based Modal Analysis (OBMA) method by providing a unified set of modal parameters with higher accuracy. As such, AOBMA showed a lower mean absolute relative error of 0.03 for damping ratio estimations across compared modes while OBMA provided an error value of 0.32 depending on the processed order. At excitation with high harmonic contributions, AOBMA also resulted in the highest number of accurately identified modes among the compared methods. At a harmonic ratio of 0.8, for example, AOBMA identified an average of 11.9 modes per estimation, while OBMA and baseline OMA followed with 9.5 and 9 modes, respectively. Moreover, it is the first study, which systematically evaluates the impact of excitation conditions on the compared methods and finds an advantage of OBMA and AOBMA over traditional OMA regarding mode shape estimation accuracy. While OMA can be used to evaluate significant structural changes, Machine Learning (ML) methods have seen substantially greater success in condition monitoring, including RUL prediction. However, as these methods often require large amounts of time and cost- intensive training data, a novel data-efficient RUL prediction methodology is introduced, taking advantage of distinct healthy and faulty condition data. When the number of training sequences from an open dataset is reduced to 5%, an average prediction Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 24.9 operation cycles is achieved, outperforming the baseline method with an RMSE of 28.1. Motivated by environmental considerations, the impact of data reduction on the training duration of several method variants is quantified. When the full training set is utilised, the most resource-saving variant of the proposed approach achieves an average training duration of 8.9% compared to the baseline method

Asymmetric HMMs for online ball-bearing health assessments

The degradation of critical components inside large industrial assets, such as ball-bearings, has a negative impact on production facilities, reducing the availability of assets due to an unexpectedly high failure rate. Machine learning- based monitoring systems can estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) of ball-bearings, reducing the downtime by early failure detection. However, traditional approaches for predictive systems require run-to-failure (RTF) data as training data, which in real scenarios can be scarce and expensive to obtain as the expected useful life could be measured in years. Therefore, to overcome the need of RTF, we propose a new methodology based on online novelty detection and asymmetrical hidden Markov models (As-HMM) to work out the health assessment. This new methodology does not require previous RTF data and can adapt to natural degradation of mechanical components over time in data-stream and online environments. As the system is designed to work online within the electrical cabinet of machines it has to be deployed using embedded electronics. Therefore, a performance analysis of As-HMM is presented to detect the strengths and critical points of the algorithm. To validate our approach, we use real life ball-bearing data-sets and compare our methodology with other methodologies where no RTF data is needed and check the advantages in RUL prediction and health monitoring. As a result, we showcase a complete end-to-end solution from the sensor to actionable insights regarding RUL estimation towards maintenance application in real industrial environments.This study was supported partially by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the PID2019-109247GB-I00 project and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the RTC2019-006871-7 (DSTREAMS project). Also, by the H2020 IoTwins project (Distributed Digital Twins for industrial SMEs: a big-data platform) funded by the EU under the call ICT-11-2018- 2019, Grant Agreement No. 857191.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Prognostics and Health Management of Lithium-Ion Batteries

For Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) of Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, many models have been established to characterize their degradation process. The existing empirical or physical models can reveal important information regarding the degradation dynamics. However, there are no general and flexible methods to fuse the information represented by those models. Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) is an efficient tool to fuse empirical or physical dynamic models with data-driven models. To take full advantage of various information sources, we propose a model fusion scheme based on PINN. It is implemented by developing a semi-empirical semi-physical Partial Differential Equation (PDE) to model the degradation dynamics of Li-ion batteries. When there is little prior knowledge about the dynamics, we leverage the data-driven Deep Hidden Physics Model (DeepHPM) to discover the underlying governing dynamic models. The uncovered dynamics information is then fused with that mined by the surrogate neural network in the PINN framework. Moreover, an uncertainty-based adaptive weighting method is employed to balance the multiple learning tasks when training the PINN. The proposed methods are verified on a public dataset of Li-ion Phosphate (LFP)/graphite batteries.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure

Online Bearing Remaining Useful Life Prediction Based on a Novel Degradation Indicator and Convolutional Neural Networks

In industrial applications, nearly half the failures of motors are caused by the degradation of rolling element bearings (REBs). Therefore, accurately estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) for REBs are of crucial importance to ensure the reliability and safety of mechanical systems. To tackle this challenge, model-based approaches are often limited by the complexity of mathematical modeling. Conventional data-driven approaches, on the other hand, require massive efforts to extract the degradation features and construct health index. In this paper, a novel online data-driven framework is proposed to exploit the adoption of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) in predicting the RUL of bearings. More concretely, the raw vibrations of training bearings are first processed using the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) and a novel nonlinear degradation indicator is constructed as the label for learning. The CNN is then employed to identify the hidden pattern between the extracted degradation indicator and the vibration of training bearings, which makes it possible to estimate the degradation of the test bearings automatically. Finally, testing bearings' RULs are predicted by using a $\epsilon$-support vector regression model. The superior performance of the proposed RUL estimation framework, compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, is demonstrated through the experimental results. The generality of the proposed CNN model is also validated by transferring to bearings undergoing different operating conditions