An Automatic Partition Time-Varying Markov Model for Reliability Evaluation

Abstract

As the service time of mechanical devices is getting longer and longer, the safe and reliability evaluation during operation is highlighted. Moreover, real-time reliability evaluation with consideration of multi-state performance degradation becomes increasingly important nowadays, since the consequences of sudden failures are more unacceptable than ever before. The Markov process is a commonly used model in multi-state reliability evaluation. However, little research of the Markov model can deal with multi-source monitoring data and time-varying properties of device performance degradation, as well as the scientific state number determination. In this article, a real-time reliability evaluation model based on automatic partition and the time-varying Markov chain is proposed to solve the problems of the scientific state number selection and time-varying properties description with the state transition matrix of the Markov process, together with taking advantage of multi-source information. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated on the bearing with life-long vibration and temperature data. It shows that the proposed automatic partition time-varying Markov model can decide the state number automatically according to the trend of life-long data, and evaluate real-time reliability based on equipment operating hours and operating status. The result of predicted remaining useful life obtained by the proposed model is more accurate, and it also shows great superiority in conformity with reality.