Dealing with prognostics uncertainties: Combination of direct and recursive remaining useful life estimations

Data-driven prognostics and health management is an important part of the future industry. It allows the detection of system faults and estimation of its remaining useful life (RUL) to anticipate failures and schedule appropriate prescriptive maintenance actions. Moreover, with the development of data acquisition tools in such industries, it is possible to collect large amount of data from similar systems, which prompts the use of machine learning algorithms for efficient estimation of the system RUL. However, due to different type of faults and degradation rates that can occur in real processes, there exists high variability of the end-of-life (EoL) time of each system degradation trajectory, making more difficult to fix a failure threshold and consequently generate several uncertainties in the estimation of RUL. To address this situation, this paper proposes a new data-driven approach for estimating the system RUL when dealing with the variability of degradation trends and unknown failure thresholds. Particularly, the proposed approach combines two RUL techniques, recursive and direct RUL estimation. First, the historical collected raw data are fed into a processing algorithm to construct prognostic health indicators (HIs) and choose the one that characterizes well the system’s degradation trajectory. This latter indicator allows identifying the high and low EoL amplitude values from the historical data and is used to build a recursive prediction model that estimates in long-term the degradation trend evolution. After that, the trained model forecasts every degradation trend which EoL amplitude is less than the predefined high value. Thus, a set of possible RULs of each trajectory can be predicted. Finally, the ensemble of the derived RULs and their HI trajectories are fused to directly estimate the final RUL. The proposed approach is applied to a subway door system with multiple degradation scenarios while taking into account different operating conditions.