Remaining Useful Life Prediction With Fusing Failure Time Data and Field Degradation Data With Random Effects

Accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction has a great significance to improve the reliability and safety for key equipment. However, it often occur imperfect or even no prior degradation information in practical application for the existing RUL prediction methods, which could produce prediction error. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a two-step RUL prediction method based on Wiener processes with reasonably fusing the failure time data and field degradation data. First, we obtain some interesting natures of parameters estimation based on the basic linear Wiener process. These natures explain the relationship between the parameters estimation results and the feature of degradation data, i.e. item sample numbers, detection time and detect frequency, and give the basis regarding how to reasonably fuse the failure time data and field degradation data. Second, under the Bayesian framework, we further propose a two-step method by fusing the failure time data and field degradation data with considering the random effects based on the proposed natures of parameters estimation. In this method, we propose an EM algorithm to estimate the mean and variance drift parameter of Wiener processes by the failure time data. Next, we generalize this two-step RUL prediction method to the nonlinear Wiener process. Last, we use two case studies to demonstrate the usefulness and superiority of the proposed method.