Asymmetric HMMs for Online Ball-Bearing Health Assessments

The degradation of critical components inside large industrial assets, such as ball-bearings, has a negative impact on production facilities, reducing the availability of assets due to an unexpectedly high failure rate. Machine learning-based monitoring systems can estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) of ball bearings, reducing the downtime by early failure detection. However, traditional approaches for predictive systems require run-to-failure (RTF) data as training data, which in real scenarios can be scarce and expensive to obtain as the expected useful life could be measured in years. Therefore, to overcome the need of RTF, we propose a new methodology based on online novelty detection and asymmetrical hidden Markov models (As-HMMs) to work out the health assessment. This new methodology does not require previous RTF data and can adapt to natural degradation of mechanical components over time in data-stream and online environments. As the system is designed to work online within the electrical cabinet of machines, it has to be deployed using embedded electronics. Therefore, a performance analysis of As-HMM is presented to detect the strengths and critical points of the algorithm. To validate our approach, we use real life ball-bearing data sets and compare our methodology with other methodologies where no RTF data are needed and check the advantages in RUL prediction and health monitoring. As a result, we showcase a complete end-to-end solution from the sensor to actionable insights regarding RUL estimation toward maintenance application in real industrial environments.