APFeb 22
Prognostics of Multisensor Systems with Unknown and Unlabeled Failure Modes via Bayesian Nonparametric Process MixturesKani Fu, Sanduni S Disanayaka Mudiyanselage, Chunli Dai et al.
Modern manufacturing systems often experience multiple and unpredictable failure behaviors, yet most existing prognostic models assume a fixed, known set of failure modes with labeled historical data. This assumption limits the use of digital twins for predictive maintenance, especially in high-mix or adaptive production environments, where new failure modes may emerge, and the failure mode labels may be unavailable. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Bayesian nonparametric framework that unifies a Dirichlet process mixture module for unsupervised failure mode discovery with a neural network-based prognostic module. The key innovation lies in an iterative feedback mechanism to jointly learn two modules. These modules iteratively update one another to dynamically infer, expand, or merge failure modes as new data arrive while providing high prognostic accuracy. Experiments on both simulation and aircraft engine datasets show that the proposed approach performs competitively with or significantly better than existing approaches. It also exhibits robust online adaptation capabilities, making it well-suited for digital-twin-based system health management in complex manufacturing environments.
MEJun 20, 2025
Bayesian Joint Model of Multi-Sensor and Failure Event Data for Multi-Mode Failure PredictionSina Aghaee Dabaghan Fard, Minhee Kim, Akash Deep et al.
Modern industrial systems are often subject to multiple failure modes, and their conditions are monitored by multiple sensors, generating multiple time-series signals. Additionally, time-to-failure data are commonly available. Accurately predicting a system's remaining useful life (RUL) requires effectively leveraging multi-sensor time-series data alongside multi-mode failure event data. In most existing models, failure modes and RUL prediction are performed independently, ignoring the inherent relationship between these two tasks. Some models integrate multiple failure modes and event prediction using black-box machine learning approaches, which lack statistical rigor and cannot characterize the inherent uncertainty in the model and data. This paper introduces a unified approach to jointly model the multi-sensor time-series data and failure time concerning multiple failure modes. This proposed model integrate a Cox proportional hazards model, a Convolved Multi-output Gaussian Process, and multinomial failure mode distributions in a hierarchical Bayesian framework with corresponding priors, enabling accurate prediction with robust uncertainty quantification. Posterior distributions are effectively obtained by Variational Bayes, and prediction is performed with Monte Carlo sampling. The advantages of the proposed model is validated through extensive numerical and case studies with jet-engine dataset.