Remaining Life Prediction Based on Wiener Processes with ADT Prior Information

Precisely predicting the remaining life for an individual plays an important role in condition‐based maintenance, so Bayesian inference method, which can integrate useful data from several sources to improve the prediction accuracy, has became a research hot. Aiming at the situation that accelerated degradation tests have been widely applied to assess the reliability of products, a remaining life prediction method based on Bayesian inference by taking accelerated degradation data as prior information is proposed. A Wiener process with random drift, diffusion parameters is used to model degradation data, and conjugate prior distributions of random parameters are adopted. To solve the problem that it is hard to estimate the hyper parameters from accelerated degradation data using an Expectation Maximization algorithm, a data extrapolation method is developed. With acceleration factors, degradation data are extrapolated from accelerated stress levels to the normal use stress level. Acceleration factor constant hypothesis is used to deduce the expression of acceleration factor for a Wiener degradation model. Besides, simulation tests are designed to validate the proposed method. The method of constructing the confidence levels for the remaining life predictions is also provided. Finally, a case study is used to illustrate the application of our developed method. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.