Collaborative Research: Collaborative Degradation Analysis for Enterprise-Level Maintenance Management via Dynamic Segmentation

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There is an emerging need for enterprise-level management in many applications where a large number of units operate, which requires thorough understanding of their degradation patterns. While recent advancements in sensing technology provide unprecedented data collection opportunities, developing the desired enterprise-level framework, however, faces several challenges. A common practice is to identify a representative degradation model that assumes the homogeneity of all units throughout their operational life. Such approaches capture average characteristics, but ignore differences among the units and the different degradation paths taken by different units. Another alternative, that of individualizing management operations for each unit, is either intractable or unrealistically costly, given the sheer number of units involved at the enterprise level. This project will lead to an implementable integrated framework for learning heterogeneous degradation processes of a large number of units and guiding the allocation of limited monitoring and maintenance resources. The results from this research will benefit a variety of US manufacturing or production enterprises that operate massive number of working units. This research aligns well with the educational efforts to prepare the nation's next-generation engineering workforce for manufacturing enterprises via integration of underrepresented undergraduate student mentoring into advanced research, K-12 outreach programs incorporating basic and advanced engineering design activities and opportunities for students to interact with field engineers in industry and to partner with international collaborators.The objective of this project is to create a collaborative prognostics and health management methodology for manufacturing enterprises. The integrative framework will model the heterogeneous degradation processes of a large number of units by investigating the differences and similarities among individual units: the population characteristics will be represented by a manageable number of canonical models forming an enterprise knowledge base, whereas the individual degradation characteristics will be captured via dynamic segmentation that models the resemblance between each unit's degradation pattern with the canonical models. The results will contribute to the following scientific advancements: 1) a new collaborative degradation modeling method which can characterize both population-level and individual-level heterogeneities in their degradation mechanism; 2) a scalable sensing method which can incorporate both statistical prognostics information and segment structure for effectively monitoring a large number of units; 3) an enterprise-level maintenance decision-making which can minimize the overall costs by exploiting the interdependency of the cost structure while conducting multi-unit repairs.