Due to the advances in digitalization, condition monitoring systems have found numerous applications in the industry due to benefits such as improved reliability and lowered costs through condition-based or predictive maintenance. Condition monitoring systems typically involve elements, such as data acquisition via suitable sensors, data preprocessing, feature extraction and selection, diagnostics, prognostics and (maintenance) decisions based on diagnosis or prognosis. For the application-specific development of a suitable condition monitoring system, each of these elements requires individual settings. Due to the uncertainty of the future, an open question arises in the condition monitoring field, which is reflected in unknown future operating and environmental conditions. This uncertainty needs consideration in all elements of a condition monitoring system. This article focuses on feature extraction and selection, building on the hypothesis that the remaining useful life of a technical system can be predicted with high accuracy utilizing suitable features. In this article, health indicators derived from time-domain features that permit the monitoring of the health of critical system components are presented for predicting the remaining useful life of technical systems. Three distinct application examples based on rubber-metal elements and rolling-element bearings are evaluated to validate the suitability of the presented methods. Experimental data from accelerated lifetime tests conducted under non-stationary operating and environmental conditions are considered to take possible future uncertainties into account. It can be concluded from the acquired results that health indicators derived from the presented time series toolbox are robust to varying operating and environmental conditions.

Several methods, including order analysis, wavelet analysis and empirical mode decomposition have been proposed and successfully employed for the health state estimation of technical systems operating under varying conditions. However, where information such as the speed of rotating machinery, component specifications or other domain-specific information is unavailable, such methods are often infeasible. Thus, this paper investigates the application of classical time-domain features, features from the medical field and novel features from the highly comparative time-series analysis (HCTSA) package, for the health state estimation of rotating machinery operating under varying conditions. Furthermore, several feature selection methods are investigated to identify features as viable health indicators for the diagnostics and prognostics of technical systems. As a case study, the presented methods are evaluated on real-world and experimentally acquired vibration data of bearings operating under varying speed. The results show that the selected features can successfully be employed as health indicators for technical systems operating under varying conditions.

In the industry 4.0 era, there is a growing need to transform unstructured data acquired by a multitude of sources into information and subsequently into knowledge to improve the quality of manufactured products, to boost production, for predictive maintenance, etc. Data-driven approaches, such as machine learning techniques, are typically employed to model the underlying relationship from data. However, an increase in model accuracy with state-of-the-art methods, such as deep convolutional neural networks, results in less interpretability and transparency. Due to the ease of implementation, interpretation and transparency to both domain experts and non-experts, a rule-based method is proposed in this paper, for prognostics and health management (PHM) and specifically for diagnostics. The proposed method utilizes the most relevant sensor signals acquired via feature extraction and selection techniques and expert knowledge. As a case study, the presented method is evaluated on data from a real-world quality control set-up provided by the European prognostics and health management society (PHME) at the conference’s 2021 data challenge. With the proposed method, our team took the third place, capable of successfully diagnosing different fault modes, irrespective of varying conditions.

In all fields, the significance of a reliable and accurate predictive model is almost unquantifiable. With deep domain knowledge, models derived from first principles typically outperforms other models in terms of reliability and accuracy. When it may become a cumbersome or an unachievable task to build or validate such models of complex (non-linear) systems, machine learning techniques are employed to build predictive models. However, the accuracy of such techniques is not only dependent on the hyper-parameters of the chosen algorithm, but also on the amount and quality of data. This paper investigates the application of classical time series forecasting approaches for the reliable prognostics of technical systems, where black box machine learning techniques might not successfully be employed given insufficient amount of data and where first principles models are infeasible due to lack of domain specific data. Forecasting by analogy, forecasting by analytical function fitting, an exponential smoothing forecasting method and the long short-term memory (LSTM) are evaluated and compared against the ground truth data. As a case study, the methods are applied to predict future crack lengths of riveted aluminium plates under cyclic loading. The performance of the predictive models is evaluated based on error metrics leading to a proposal of when to apply which forecasting approach.