Bayesian Estimation of Residual Life for Weibull-Distributed Components of On-Orbit Satellites Based on Multi-Source Information Fusion

Residual life estimation is an important problem in reliability engineering. Traditional methods, which are based on time-to-failure distribution, have limitations for components of on-orbit satellites characterized as high reliability with small sample size. Various types of reliability information can be collected during test and operation, including historical lifetime data, degradation data, similar data, expert information, etc. Therefore, making full use of multi-source information is meaningful for improving estimation precision. However, research on residual life estimation by fusing multi-source information is rare. No study has examined the overall process of fusing all of the different kinds of information. In this paper, a Bayesian method is presented to estimate the residual life of Weibull-distributed components of on-orbit satellites by fusing all the collected information. Prior distributions are determined using different kinds of information. After fusing the field data, posterior distributions can be obtained corresponding to each prior distribution. Then, the joint posterior distribution is the weighted sum of these posterior distributions with weights calculated using the second Maximum Likelihood Estimation (ML-II) method. Consistency is tested to guarantee the safety of the information fusion. Furthermore, residual life is estimated by the proposed sample-based method including both the Bayesian estimate and credible interval (CI). A Monte Carlo simulation study is conducted to demonstrate the proposed methods and shows that the Bayesian method is satisfactory and robust. Finally, a published dataset of the momentum wheel in a satellite is analyzed to illustrate the application of the method.