Shapelet-based remaining useful life estimation

In the Prognostics and Health Management domain, estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of critical machinery is a challenging task. Various research topics as data acquisition and processing, fusion, diagnostics, prognostivs and decision are involved in this domain. This paper presents an approach for estimating the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of equipments based on shapelet extraction and characterization. This approach makes use in a first step of an history of run-to-failure data to extract discriminative rul-shapelets, i.e. shapelets that are correlated with the RUL of the considered equipment. A library of rul-shapelets is extracted from this step. Then, in an online step, these rul-shapelets are compared to different test units and the ones that match these units are used to estimate their RULs. This approach is hence different from classical similarity-based approaches that matches the test units with training ones. Here, discriminative patterns from the training set are first extracted and then matched to test units. The performance of our approach is assessed on a data set coming from a previous PHM Challenge. We show that this approach is efficient to estimate the RUL compared to other approaches.