RUL prediction based on a new similarity-instance based approach.

International audiencePrognostics is a major activity of Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) in many industrial domains where safety,reliability and cost reduction are of high importance. The main objective of prognostics is to provide an estimation of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a degrading component/ system, i.e. to predict the time after which a component/system will no longer be able to meet its operating requirements. RUL prediction is a challenging task that requires special attention when modeling the prognostics approach. This paper proposes a RUL prediction approach based on Instance Based Learning (IBL) with an emphasis on the retrieval step of the latter. The method is divided into two steps: an offline and an online step.The purpose of the offline phase is to learn a model that represents the degradation behavior of a critical component using a history of run-to-failure data. This modeling step enablesus to construct a library of health indicators (HI) from run-to-failure data. These HI’s are then used online to estimate the RUL of components at an early stage of life, by comparing their HI’s to the ones of the library built in the offline phase. Our approach makes use of a new similarity measure between HIs. The proposed approach was tested on real turbofan data set and showed good performance compared to other existing approaches

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

A Similarity-Based Prognostics Approach for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Physics-based and data-driven models are the two major prognostic approaches in the literature with their own advantages and disadvantages. This paper presents a similarity-based data-driven prognostic methodology and efficiency analysis study on remaining useful life estimation results. A similarity-based prognostic model is modified to employ the most similar training samples for RUL estimations on each time instance. The presented model is tested on; Virkler’s fatigue crack growth dataset, a drilling process degradation dataset, and a sliding chair degradation of a turnout system dataset. Prediction performances are compared utilizing an evaluation metric. Efficiency analysis of optimization results show that the modified similarity-based model performs better than the original definition

Prognosis of Bearing Acoustic Emission Signals Using Supervised Machine Learning

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Acoustic emission (AE) technique can be successfully utilized for condition monitoring of various machining and industrial processes. To keep machines function at optimal levels, fault prognosis model to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of machine components is required. This model is used to analyze the output signals of a machine whilst in operation and accordingly helps to set an early alarm tool that reduces the untimely replacement of components and the wasteful machine downtime. Recent improvements indicate the drive on the way towards incorporation of prognosis and diagnosis machine learning techniques in future machine health management systems. With this in mind, this work employs three supervised machine learning techniques; support vector machine regression, multilayer artificial neural network model and gaussian process regression, to correlate AE features with corresponding natural wear of slow speed bearings throughout series of laboratory experiments. Analysis of signal parameters such as signal intensity estimator and root mean square was undertaken to discriminate individual types of early damage. It was concluded that neural networks model with back propagation learning algorithm has an advantage over the other models in estimating the RUL for slow speed bearings if the proper network structure is chosen and sufficient data is provided.Peer reviewe

Unsupervised Kernel Regression Modeling Approach for RUL Prediction.

International audienceRecently, Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) has gained attention from the industrial world since it aims at increasing safety and reliability while reducing the maintenance cost by providing a useful prediction about the RemainingUseful Life (RUL) of critical components/system.In this paper, an Instance-Based Learning (IBL) approach is proposed for RUL prediction. Instances correspond to trajectories representing run-to-failure data of a component. These trajectories are modeled using Unsupervised Kernel Regression (UKR). A historical database is used to learn a UKR model for each training unit. These models fuse the run-to-failure data into a single feature that evolves over time and hence allow the construction of a library of instances. When unseen sensory data arrive, the learned UKR models are used to construct the test degradation trajectories. RUL is deduced by comparing the test degradation trajectory to the library of instance. Only the most similar train instances are kept for RUL prediction. The proposed approach was tested and compared to approaches that apply linear regression and PCA to model the library of instances. Results highlight the benefit of using UK compared to other approaches

Physics-based prognostic modelling of filter clogging phenomena

In industry, contaminant filtration is a common process to achieve a desired level of purification, since contaminants in liquids such as fuel may lead to performance drop and rapid wear propagation. Generally, clogging of filter phenomena is the primary failure mode leading to the replacement or cleansing of filter. Cascading failures and weak performance of the system are the unfortunate outcomes due to a clogged filter. Even though filtration and clogging phenomena and their effects of several observable parameters have been studied for quite some time in the literature, progression of clogging and its use for prognostics purposes have not been addressed yet. In this work, a physics based clogging progression model is presented. The proposed model that bases on a well-known pressure drop equation is able to model three phases of the clogging phenomena, last of which has not been modelled in the literature yet. In addition, the presented model is integrated with particle filters to predict the future clogging levels and to estimate the remaining useful life of fuel filters. The presented model has been implemented on the data collected from an experimental rig in the lab environment. In the rig, pressure drop across the filter, flow rate, and filter mesh images are recorded throughout the accelerated degradation experiments. The presented physics based model has been applied to the data obtained from the rig. The remaining useful lives of the filters used in the experimental rig have been reported in the paper. The results show that the presented methodology provides significantly accurate and precise prognostic results