A reliability estimation method based on combination of failure mechanism and ANN supported wiener processes

Abstract

For some engineering application, accurately estimating reliability only depend on the history data or failure mechanism is difficult to implement, due to the lack of data and imperfect theory of failure mechanism. Namely, both history data and failure mechanism should be utilized to improve the reliability estimation accuracy for engineering applications. Hence, we construct a reliability estimation method by fusing the failure mechanism and artificial neural network (ANN) supported Wiener processes for utilizing both history data and failure mechanism. ANN and failure mechanism are integrated into Wiener process with random effects, respectively. Bayesian model averaging (BMA) method is adapted to combine the failure mechanism with ANN supported Wiener processes, as well as to update the model parameters by fusing data. Based on a typical aviation hydraulic pump's actual dataset, we illustrate the advantages of our approach by comparing to Wiener process supported only by ANN or failure mechanism in engineering practices. The proposed method shows superiorities on reliability estimation considering the estimation accuracies comparing the other two models.