A Risk-Averse Remaining Useful Life Estimation for Predictive Maintenance

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is an advanced technique for system maintenance scheduling. Most of existing RUL prediction methods are only interested in the precision of RUL estimation; the adverse impact of over-estimated RUL on maintenance scheduling is not of concern. In this work, an RUL estimation method with risk-averse adaptation is developed which can reduce the over-estimation rate while maintaining a reasonable under-estimation level. The proposed method includes a module of degradation feature selection to obtain crucial features which reflect system degradation trends. Then, the latent structure between the degradation features and the RUL labels is modeled by a support vector regression (SVR) model and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, respectively. To enhance the prediction robustness and increase its marginal utility, the SVR model and the LSTM model are integrated to generate a hybrid model via three connection parameters. By designing a cost function with penalty mechanism, the three parameters are determined using a modified grey wolf optimization algorithm. In addition, a cost metric is proposed to measure the benefit of such a risk-averse predictive maintenance method. Verification is done using an aero-engine data set from NASA. The results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed RUL estimation method and the predictive maintenance strategy.