Remaining useful life prediction for engineering systems under dynamic operational conditions: A semi-Markov decision process-based approach

Abstract For critical engineering systems such as aircraft and aerospace vehicles, accurate Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction not only means cost saving, but more importantly, is of great significance in ensuring system reliability and preventing disaster. RUL is affected not only by a system’s intrinsic deterioration, but also by the operational conditions under which the system is operating. This paper proposes an RUL prediction approach to estimate the mean RUL of a continuously degrading system under dynamic operational conditions and subjected to condition monitoring at short equi-distant intervals. The dynamic nature of the operational conditions is described by a discrete-time Markov chain, and their influences on the degradation signal are quantified by degradation rates and signal jumps in the degradation model. The uniqueness of our proposed approach is formulating the RUL prediction problem in a semi-Markov decision process framework, by which the system mean RUL can be obtained through the solution to a limited number of equations. To extend the use of our proposed approach in real applications, different failure standards according to different operational conditions are also considered. The application and effectiveness of this approach are illustrated by a turbofan engine dataset and a comparison with existing results for the same dataset.