A Fusion Prognostic Method for Remaining Useful Life Prediction Based on an Extended Belief Rule Base and Particle Filters

As a critical part of prognostics and health management (PHM), remaining useful life (RUL) prediction can provide manufacturers and users with system lifetime information and improve the reliability of maintainable systems. Particle filters (PFs) are powerful tools for RUL prediction because they can represent the uncertainty of results well. However, due to the lack of measurement data, the parameters of the measurement model cannot be updated during the long-term prediction process. Additionally, for complex systems, the measurement model of a system often cannot be obtained in an analytical form. In this paper, a fusion prognostic method based on an extended belief rule base (EBRB) and a PF is designed to solve these problems. In the proposed framework, a double-layer maximum mean discrepancy-extended belief rule base (DMMD-EBRB) model with time delay is adopted to estimate and predict the hidden behavior of a degrading system. The unknown parameters of the degradation model are identified by the PF using the output of the EBRB. Afterwards, the system state is further predicted by the PF. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated with the NASA-PCoE and CALCE lithium-ion battery degradation experiment datasets. In addition, several other related fusion methods are investigated for comparison with the proposed method. The experiments show that the proposed method yields better performance than the existing methods.