Remaining Useful Life estimation based on discriminating shapelet extraction.

International audienceIn the Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) domain, estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of critical machinery is a challenging task. Various research topics as data acquisition, fusion, diagnostics, prognostics and decision are involved in this domain. This paper presents an approach to estimate the Remaining Useful Life of equipment based on shapelet extraction. This approach makes use, in an offline step, of a history of run-to-failure data to extract discriminative rul-shapelets, i.e. patterns that are correlated with the RUL of the considered equipment. A library of rul-shapelets is hence extracted at this step. Then, in an online step, these rul-shapelets are compared to testing units and the ones that match these units are used to estimate their RULs.Therefore, the RUL estimation of a testing unit is based on patterns that have been selected for their high correlation with the RUL. This approach is hence different from classical similaritybased approaches that attempt to match complete testing units (or only late instants of testing units) with training ones to estimate the RUL. The performance of our approach is assessed with a case study on the remaining useful life estimation of turbofan engines and performance is compared with other similarity-based approaches