Collaborative prognostics in Social Asset Networks

Abstract

With the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, assets have acquired communication, processing and sensing capabilities. In response, the fi eld of Asset Management has moved from fleet-wide failure models to individualised asset prognostics. Individualised models are seldom truly distributed, and often fail to capitalise the processing power of the asset fleet. This leads to hardly scalable machine learning centralised models that often must nd a compromise between accuracy and computational power. In order to overcome this, we present a novel theoretical approach to collaborative prognostics within the Social Internet of Things. We introduce the concept of Social Asset Networks, de ned as networks of cooperating assets with sensing, communicating and computing capabilities. In the proposed approach, the information obtained from the medium by means of sensors is synthesised into a Health Indicator, which determines the state of the asset. The Health Indicator of each asset evolves according to an equation determined by a triplet of parameters. Assets are given the form of the equation but they ignore their parametric values. To obtain these values, assets use the equation in order to perform a non-linear least squares t of their Health Indicator data. Using these estimated parameters, they are interconnected to a subset of collaborating assets by means of a similarity metric. We show how by simply interchanging their estimates, networked assets are able to precisely determine their Health Indicator dynamics and reduce maintenance costs. This is done in real time, with no centralised library, and without the need for extensive historical data. We compare Social Asset Networks with the typical self-learning and fleet-wide approaches, and show that Social Asset Networks have a faster convergence and lower cost. This study serves as a conceptual proof for the potential of collaborative prognostics for solving maintenance problems, and can be used to justify the implementation of such a system in a real industrial fleet.