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During the two last decades, the failure prognostics has been given an increasing importance by the researchers and industrials thanks to the benefits its results can induce in terms of availability, security, and maintenance costs. However, a detailed study of the literature in the domain shows that most of the published works deal with prognostics at component level, where the failure of the system is linked to the failure of its critical components. Even if this assumption can be tolerated in some cases, it cannot be generalized. This is because, in practice, the components are interconnected and, consequently, a degradation of one component can affect the others leading to a modification in the system’s health state and then in its remaining useful life (RUL). To take into account this reality, a new model for prognostics is proposed in this article, namely inoperability input–output model (IIM). This model allows representing multicomponent systems while considering the interactions between their components. More than that, the IIM enables to integrate the mission profile effects on the system degradations to make its RUL predictions more accurate. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling approach, a mechatronic system is considered as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a condition monitoring approach for point machine prognostics to increase the reliability, availability, and safety in railway transportation industry. The proposed approach is composed of three steps: 1) health indicator (HI) construction by data fusion, 2) health state assessment, and 3) failure prognostics. In Step 1, the time-domain features are extracted and evaluated by hybrid and consistency feature evaluation metrics to select the best class of prognostics features. Then, the selected feature class is combined with the adaptive feature fusion algorithm to build a generic point machine HI. In Step 2, health state division is accomplished by time-series segmentation algorithm using the fused HI. Then, fault detection is performed by using a support vector machine classifier. Once the faulty state has been classified (i.e., incipient/starting fault), the single spectral analysis recurrent forecasting is triggered to estimate the component remaining useful life. The proposed methodology is validated on in-field point machine sliding-chair degradation data. The results show that the approach can be effectively used in railway point machine monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection, diagnostic, and prognostic of bearing degradation play a key role in increasing the reliability and safety of electrical machines, especially in key industrial sectors. This paper presents a new approach that combines the Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT), the support vector machine (SVM), and the support vector regression (SVR) for the monitoring of ball bearings. The proposed approach uses the HHT to extract new heath indicators from stationary/nonstationary vibration signals able to tack the degradation of the critical components of bearings. The degradation states are detected by a supervised classification technique called SVM, and the fault diagnostic is given by analyzing the extracted health indicators. The estimation of the remaining useful life is obtained by a one-step time-series prediction based on SVR. A set of experimental data collected from degraded bearings is used to validate the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the use of the HHT, the SVM, and the SVR is a suitable strategy to improve the detection, diagnostic, and prognostic of bearing degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prognostics activity deals with the estimation of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of physical systems based on their current health state and their future operating conditions. RUL estimation can be done by using two main approaches, namely model-based and data-driven approaches. The first approach is based on the utilization of physics of failure models of the degradation, while the second approach is based on the transformation of the data provided by the sensors into models that represent the behavior of the degradation. This paper deals with a data-driven prognostics method, where the RUL of the physical system is assessed depending on its critical component. Once the critical component is identified, and the appropriate sensors installed, the data provided by these sensors are exploited to model the degradation's behavior. For this purpose, Mixture of Gaussians Hidden Markov Models (MoG-HMMs), represented by Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs), are used as a modeling tool. MoG-HMMs allow us to represent the evolution of the component's health condition by hidden states by using temporal or frequency features extracted from the raw signals provided by the sensors. The prognostics process is then done in two phases: a learning phase to generate the behavior model, and an exploitation phase to estimate the current health state and calculate the RUL. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method is verified by implementing prognostics performance metrics, such as accuracy, precision, and prediction horizon. Finally, the proposed method is applied to real data corresponding to the accelerated life of bearings, and experimental results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a data-driven prognostics method for the estimation of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) and the associated confidence value of bearings. The proposed method is based on the utilization of the Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD) technique, and the Mixture of Gaussians Hidden Markov Models (MoG-HMM). The method relies on two phases: an off-line phase, and an on-line phase. During the first phase, the raw data provided by the sensors are first processed to extract features in the form of WPD coefficients. The extracted features are then fed to dedicated learning algorithms to estimate the parameters of a corresponding MoG-HMM, which best fits the degradation phenomenon. The generated model is exploited during the second phase to continuously assess the current health state of the physical component, and to estimate its RUL value with the associated confidence. The developed method is tested on benchmark data taken from the “NASA prognostics data repository” related to several experiments of failures on bearings done under different operating conditions. Furthermore, the method is compared to traditional time-feature prognostics and simulation results are given at the end of the paper. The results of the developed prognostics method, particularly the estimation of the RUL, can help improving the availability, reliability, and security while reducing the maintenance costs. Indeed, the RUL and associated confidence value are relevant information which can be used to take appropriate maintenance and exploitation decisions. In practice, this information may help the maintainers to prepare the necessary material and human resources before the occurrence of a failure. Thus, the traditional maintenance policies involving corrective and preventive maintenance can be replaced by condition based maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]