Abstract:

Remaining useful life estimation is central to the prognostics and health management of systems, particularly for safety-critical systems, and systems that are very expensive. We present a non-linear model to estimate the remaining useful life of a system based on monitored degradation signals. A diffusion process with a non-linear drift coefficient with a constant threshold was transformed to a linear model with a variable threshold to
characterize the dynamics and non-linearity of the degradation process. This new diffusion process contrasts sharply with existing models that use a linear drift, and also with models that use a linear drift based on transformed data that were originally non-linear. Both existing models are based on a constant threshold. To estimate the remaining useful life, an analytical approximation to the distribution of the first hitting time of the diffusion process crossing a threshold level is obtained in a closed form by a time-space transformation under a mild assumption. The unknown parameters in the established model are estimated using the maximum likelihood estimation approach, and goodness of fit measures are applied. The usefulness of the proposed model is demonstrated by several real-world examples. The results reveal that considering non-linearity in the degradation process can significantly improve the accuracy of remaining useful life estimation.

Keywords : Brownian motion, degradation, diffusion process,first hitting time, maximum likelihood, non-linear drift, remaining useful life

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