A combined sensitivity analysis and kriging surrogate modeling for early validation of health indicators

To increase the dependability of complex systems, one solution is to assess their state of health continuously through the monitoring of variables sensitive to potential degradation modes. When computed in an operating environment, these variables, known as health indicators, are subject to many uncertainties. Hence, the stochastic nature of health assessment combined with the lack of data in design stages makes it difficult to evaluate the efficiency of a health indicator before the system enters into service. This paper introduces a method for early validation of health indicators during the design stages of a system development process. This method uses physics-based modeling and uncertainties propagation to create simulated stochastic data. However, because of the large number of parameters defining the model and its computation duration, the necessary runtime for uncertainties propagation is prohibitive. Thus, kriging is used to obtain low computation time estimations of the model outputs. Moreover, sensitivity analysis techniques are performed upstream to determine the hierarchization of the model parameters and to reduce the dimension of the input space. The validation is based on three types of numerical key performance indicators corresponding to the detection, identification and prognostic processes. After having introduced and formalized the framework of uncertain systems modeling and the different performance metrics, the issues of sensitivity analysis and surrogate modeling are addressed. The method is subsequently applied to the validation of a set of health indicators for the monitoring of an aircraft engine’s pumping unit.