Condition-based maintenance of dynamic systems using online failure prognosis and belief rule base

Condition-based maintenance has attracted an increasing attention both academically and practically. If the required physical models to describe the dynamic systems are unknown and the monitored information only reflects part of the state of the dynamic systems, expert knowledge is a source of valuable information to be used. However, expert knowledge is usually in a qualitative form, and therefore, needs to be transformed and combined with the measured characteristic information to provide effective prognosis. As such, this paper focuses on developing a novel approach to deal with the problem. In the proposed approach, a belief rule base (BRB) for the failure prognostic model is constructed using the expert knowledge and the analysis of the failure mechanism. An online failure prognostic algorithm is then proposed on the basis of the currently available characteristic variable information. The failure prognostic model is finally used in a condition based decision model to support the replacement decision of the dynamic systems. A case example is examined to demonstrate the implementation and potential applications of the proposed failure prognostic algorithm and the condition-based replacement model.