Investigating computational geometry for failure prognostics

Abstract

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is a multidisciplinary field aiming at maintaining physical systems in their optimal functioning conditions. The system under study is assumed to be monitored by sensors from which are obtained measurements reflecting the system’s health state. A health indicator (HI) is estimated to feed a data-driven PHM solution developed to predict the remaining useful life (RUL). In this paper, the values taken by an HI are assumed imprecise (IHI). An IHI is interpreted as a planar figure called polygon and a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach is adapted to estimate the RUL. This adaptation makes use of computational geometry tools in order to estimate the nearest cases to a given testing instance. The proposed algorithm called RULCLIPPER is assessed and compared on datasets generated by the NASA’s turbofan simulator (C-MAPSS) including the four turbofan testing datasets and the two testing datasets of the PHM’08 data challenge. These datasets represent 1360 testing instances and cover different realistic and difficult cases considering operating conditions and fault modes with unknown characteristics. The problem of feature selection, health indicator estimation, RUL fusion and ensembles are also tackled. The proposed algorithm is shown to be efficient with few parameter tuning on all datasets.