Reliable machine prognostic health management in the presence of missing data

Abstract

SummaryPrognostics and health management enables the prediction of future degradation and remaining useful life (RUL) for in‐service systems based on historical and contemporary data, showing promise for many practical applications. One major challenge for prognostics is the common occurrence of missing values in time‐series data, often caused by disruptions in sensor communication or hardware/software failures. Another major concern is that the sufficient prior knowledge of critical component degradation with a clear failure threshold is often not readily available in practice. These issues can significantly hinder the application of advanced signal and data analysis methods and consequently degrade the health management performance. In this article, we propose a novel data‐driven framework that is capable of providing accurate and reliable predictions of degradation and RUL. In this approach, one‐hot health state indicators are appended to the historical time series so that the model learns end‐of‐life automatically. A modified gate recurrent unit based variational autoencoder is employed in generative adversarial networks to model the temporal irregularity of the incomplete time series. Experiments on multivariate time‐series datasets collected from real‐world aeroengines verify that significant performance improvement can be achieved using the proposed model for robust long‐term prognostics.