A similarity-based prognostics approach for Remaining Useful Life estimation of engineered systems

This paper presents a similarity-based approach for estimating the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) in prognostics. The approach is especially suitable for situations in which abundant run-to-failure data for an engineered system are available. Data from multiple units of the same system are used to create a library of degradation patterns. When estimating the RUL of a test unit, the data from it will be matched to those patterns in the library and the actual life of those matched units will be used as the basis of estimation. This approach is used to tackle the data challenge problem defined by the 2008 PHM Data Challenge Competition, in which, run-to-failure data of an unspecified engineered system are provided and the RUL of a set of test units will be estimated. Results show that the similarity-based approach is very effective in performing RUL estimation.