Using Data From Similar Systems for Data-Driven Condition Diagnosis and Prognosis of Engineering Systems: A Review and an Outline of Future Research Challenges

Prognostics and health management (PHM) is an engineering approach dealing with the diagnosis, prognosis, and management of the health state of engineering systems. Methods that can analyze system behavior, fault conditions, and degradation are crucial for PHM applications, as they create the basis for determining, predicting, and monitoring the health of engineering systems. Data-driven methods have been proven to be suitable for automated diagnosis or prognosis due to their pattern recognition and anomaly detection abilities. Moreover, they do not require knowledge of the underlying degradation process. However, training data-driven methods usually requires a large amount of data, whose collection, cleansing, organization, and preparation are generally very time-consuming and costly. There are usually little or no run-to-failure data available at market launch, especially for new systems such as new machine generations. Nevertheless, related systems, hereinafter referred to as similar systems, often already exist, differing only in some technical characteristics. In this paper, the similar system problem is defined, and explanations of the difficulties that arise when using data from similar systems are presented. Furthermore, it is discussed why the usage of these data offers great potential for condition diagnosis and prognosis of engineering systems. An overview of data-driven methods that can be used to utilize data from similar systems is provided, and the methods that such systems already consider are highlighted. Two related research areas are identified, namely, fleet learning and transfer learning. In the paper, it is shown that similar system approaches will become an important branch of research in PHM. However, some difficulties must be overcome.