Overview of telematics-based prognostics and health management systems for commercial vehicles

Prognostics and Health Management/Monitoring (PHM) are methods to assess the health condition and reliability of systems for the purpose of maximising operational reliability and safety. Recently, PHM systems are emerging in the automotive industry. In the commercial vehicle sector, reducing the maintenance cost and downtime while also improving the reliability of vehicle components can have a major impact on fleet performance and hence business competitiveness. Nowadays, telematics and GPS are used mainly for fleet tracking and diagnostics purposes. Increased numbers of sensors installed on commercial vehicles, advancement of data analytics and computational intelligence methods, increased capabilities for on-board data processing as well as in the cloud, are creating an opportunity for PHM systems to be deployed on commercial vehicles and hence improve the overall operational efficiency

From faceted classification to knowledge discovery of semi-structured text records

The maintenance and service records collected and maintained by the aerospace companies are a useful resource to the in-service engineers in providing their ongoing support of their aircrafts. Such records are typically semi-structured and contain useful information such as a description of the issue and references to correspondences and documentation generated during its resolution. The information in the database is frequently retrieved to aid resolution of newly reported issues. At present, engineers may rely on a keyword search in conjunction with a number field filters to retrieve relevant records from the database. It is believed that further values can be realised from the collection of these records for indicating recurrent and systemic issues which may not have been apparent previously. A faceted classification approach was implemented to enhance the retrieval and knowledge discovery from extensive aerospace in-service records. The retrieval mechanism afforded by faceted classification can expedite responses to urgent in-service issues as well as enable knowledge discovery that could potentially lead to root-cause findings and continuous improvement. The approach can be described as a structured text mining involving records preparation, construction of the classification schemes and data mining

K.I.A.

This paper proposes a new prognosis model based on the technique for health state estimation of machines for accurate assessment of the remnant life. For the evaluation of health stages of machines, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier was employed to obtain the probability of each health state. Two case studies involving bearing failures were used to validate the proposed model. Simulated bearing failure data and experimental data from an accelerated bearing test rig were used to train and test the model. The result obtained is very encouraging and shows that the proposed prognostic model produces promising results and has the potential to be used as an estimation tool for machine remnant life prediction