Prognostics of Electromechanical Actuator with Partial Time Scaling Invariant Temporal Alignment

In today’s industrial environment, effectively monitoring assets throughout their entire lifetime is essential. Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) is a powerful tool that enables users to achieve this goal. Recently, sensor-equipped actuator electrification has been introduced to capture intrinsic key system variables as time series. This data flow has opened up new possibilities for extracting essential maintenance information. To leverage the full potential of these data, we have developed a novel algorithm for time series registration, which serves as the core of a new similarity-based prognostic method in a PHM context: Partial Time Scaling Invariant Temporal Alignment for Remaining Useful Life Estimation (PARTITA-RULE). Our algorithm transforms acceleration signals into a subset of descriptors for a new actuator, creating a time series. We can extract valuable maintenance information by aligning this time series with the one already labeled from past behaviors of the same actuator’s family of heterogeneous sizes and robust scaling factors. The unique aspect of our method is that we do not need to inject prior knowledge for registration intervals at this stage. Once the unknown series is aligned with all possible candidates, we create a weighting scheme to assign a relevance score with an uncertainty measurement for each aligned pair. Finally, we compute interpolants on the Wasserstein space to obtain the asset’s Remaining Useful Life (RUL). It is important to note that a relevant result in a PHM context requires a database filled with different labeled system behaviors. To test the effectiveness of our method, we use an industrial data set of vibration signals captured on an aeronautical electric actuator. Our method shows promising Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation results even with incomplete time segments.