Remaining useful life re-prediction methodology based on Wiener process: Subsea Christmas tree system as a case study

Abstract

With the continuous improvement of the complexity and comprehensive level of the system, its reliability becomes more and more important. The remaining useful life (RUL) estimation method using the degradation model with random effect to describe the degradation process of the system has been widely used such as Wiener process. However, the conventional Wiener-process-based degradation model only considers the current monitoring data but not the historical degradation data, which leads to the inaccuracy of RUL prediction. Furthermore, in engineering, there will always be data missing caused by sensor networks, long life cycle properties of system and so on, leading to unsatisfactory results. This paper contributed a RUL re-prediction method based on Wiener process combining the current monitoring status and historical degradation data of the system. In the initial prediction process, the Wiener process is used to describe the degradation process of the system, the drift coefficient and diffusion coefficient are estimated by Expectation Maximization algorithm (EM algorithm), and the dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) model for system performance degradation is established to solve the uncertainty caused by missing data. In the re-prediction process, n groups of performance degradation monitoring data and historical predicted data are combined to calculate the basic degradation in each stage of Wiener process, and the DBNs are used for modeling. The RUL value is obtained by the time difference between the detection point and the predicted fault point, it is determined by the failure threshold finally. A case of subsea Christmas tree system is adopted to demonstrate the proposed approach.