Bridging the Gap: A Comparative Analysis of Regressive Remaining Useful Life Prediction and Survival Analysis Methods for Predictive Maintenance

Abstract

Regressive Remaining Useful Life Prediction and Survival Analysis are two lines of research with similar goals but different origins; one from engineering and the other from survival study in clinical research. Although the two research paths share a common objective of predicting the time to an event, researchers from each path typically do not compare their methods with methods from the other direction. Given the mentioned gap, we propose a framework to compare methods from the two lines of research using run-to-failure datasets. Then by utilizing the proposed framework, we compare six models incorporating three widely recognized degradation models along with two learning algorithms. The first dataset used in this study is C-MAPSS which includes simulation data from aircraft turbofan engines. The second dataset is real-world data from streamed condition monitoring of turbocharger devices installed on a fleet of Volvo trucks.