J Intell Manuf
DOI 10.1007/s10845-015-1107-8
Machine prognostics based on sparse representation model
Likun Ren1 Weimin Lv1 Shiwei Jiang1
Received: 6 January 2015 / Accepted: 1 June 2015
Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract The prognostic technologies for machines refer
to the estimation of machines remaining useful life using
monitoring data from sensors. Different from traditional
maintenance strategies, this maintenance strategy can reduce
downtime, maintenance costs and critical risks. Given these
advantages, an increasing number of prognostic models are
introduced. Data driven methods such as neural networks
and Bayesian approaches are used widely in machine prog-
nostics. However, the sequential information and inherent
relationships among historical data are rarely considered
in these models. So, the estimations are usually not accu-
rate enough. In our paper, we take a novel methodology
to estimate the remaining useful life: first, we adopt sparse
representation model to extract the inherent relationships of
training samples and measure the similarities between test-
ing samples and training samples, and then a weight is given
to every training sample to note its similarity to the testing
sample. When all testing samples are measured, a hierarchi-
cal Hough voting process utilizing the sequential information
of monitoring data is carried out to evaluate the remaining
useful life. The industry experiment has proven the effective-
ness of our approach.
Keywords Prognostics Sparse representation Hough
voting
B Likun Ren
renlikun1988@gmail.com
1 Naval Aeronautical and Astronautical University,
Yantai 264001, China
Introduction
Reliability is an important aspect in todays industrial pro-
duction. Products with high reliability can not only reduce the
operating expense so as to improve competition (Saranga and
Knezevic 2001) but also increase the safety factor especially
in some high-risk industries such as nuclear power plants.
A survey stated that an investment of between $10,000 and
$20,000 dollars in condition monitoring may result in sav-
ings of $500,000 a year (Rao 1996). However, the complexity
of mechanical products poses great difficulties in the main-
tenance. It was reported that the operating and support cost
accounts for 70 % of the total cost in the weapons life cycle
cost (Gartner and Dibbert 2001; Ld 2001). As a result, there
is a pressing need to improve maintenance strategies. This
is where condition based maintenance (CBM) (Jardine et al.
2006) comes from. Based on monitoring data, CBM attempts
to monitor the machinery health conditions and make some
maintenance suggestions.
The prognostic technology is an essential part of CBM,
which refers to the use of automated methods to estimate
the degradation of physical systems performance and the
remaining useful life (RUL) (Si et al. 2011; Sikorska et al.
2011). Through prognostics is newly introduced to CBM, it
has yet received its prominence and spread to many domains
such as the aviation industry (Wang et al. 2009), electronics
industries (Pecht 2008), nuclear systems (Zio and Maio 2010)
and battery industries (Saha et al. 2009). There are mainly
two categories in prognostic models (Pecht and Jaai 2010):
physics-based models (Stringer et al. 2012) and data-driven
models (Schwabacher 2005).
Physics-based models take monitored systems as white
boxes and build precise mathematical models (Chryssolouris
and Toenshoff 1982) to analyze the failure models so as to
evaluate the remaining useful life through the changes of
123

operation parameters. The RUL evaluations can be highly
accurate if the models are built comprehensively and the
parameters are estimated precisely.
Data-driven models are another category of prognostic
models. These models see systems as black boxes instead.
They try to mine the internal relationships between the input
(data from sensors) and the output (the RUL) of the historical
data (also called training samples) and then build reflections
between them. When the testing samples (RUL to be evalu-
ated) are input into these models, the models will search the
relationships between these testing samples and the train-
ing samples and then give the output (the evaluated RUL)
according to the reflections built before. Because the models
are built relatively independent of complex physical models,
some data-driven models can achieve high accuracy if these
models can reflect the relationships between the input data
and their output.
Among these data-driven models, artificial neural net-
works (ANN) have been used widely in pattern recognition
areas. An ANN includes three or more layers: a layer of
input nodes, one or more layers of hidden nodes, one layer
of output nodes. A weight connects two nodes of two neigh-
bor layers. The nodes value in the upper layer is computed
by summing all the nodes plus the corresponding weights in
the lower layer. Through a learning process, the weights are
learned to render the outputs of ANN to be consistent with the
desired outputs. There are also some limitations with ANNs:
a widely known limitation is the lack of explanations on its
reasoning processes and foundations. Besides, there are no
rules or standards on how to determine the number of the
layers and nodes.
Other data-driven models include regression models
(Batko 1984; Benkedjouh et al. 2013), Bayesian approaches
(Mosallam et al. 2014), particle filtering models (Zio and
Peloni 2011), state space models (He et al. 2012) and so on.
In this paper, we propose a novel prognostics model based
on sparse representation (SRP). With an over-complete dic-
tionary D Rnk that contains k basis as its columns Because D is over-complete (n  k and D is full-rank), there
(k  n), a given signal y can be represented as a sparse linear
combination of these basis satisfying y Dx when Hence, constraints should be set on solutions to get a unique
the optimization goal is to represent y use fewest basis in
the dictionary D. A brief introduction of sparse representa-
tion can be found in Sect. 2.
In our SRP model, there are three steps: the dictionary
forming step, the sparse representation step and the RUL
evaluating step. In the dictionary forming step, the dictionary
D is formed by the extracted feature vectors of run-to-failure
data. In the sparse representation step, the sequential feature
yi extracted from sensor data is input into the sparse model
and then we can get its representation weight xi . In the RUL
evaluating step, the RUL will be evaluated in a hierarchi-
cal Hough voting process (Illingworth and Kittler 1988; Yao
et al. 2010) according to the distribution of xi under two
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assumption: one is that the training samples (run-to-failure
data) are sequential, and so the sparse representation of cer-
tain testing samples from time node i should be represented
mainly using neighbor training samples; the second is that the
testing samples are also sequential, and the neighbor testing
samples should have close RUL evaluations.
There are several advantages in our model:
Through sparse representation and Hough voting, the
internal relationships and sequential information of mon-
itoring data can be extracted, which is key to prognostic
tasks.
Compared to ANNs based models, our methodology has
fewer parameters to be determined. Whats more, our
methodology is based on the similarity measurement
between the testing samples and the training samples in
the sense of sparse representation, so its mechanism is
not so hard to explain as ANNs.
The remaining part of the paper is organized as follows. In
Sect. 2, we give a brief introduction of sparse representation
and show the detail algorithmic processes of our approach. In
Sect. 3, our results are compared with some state-of-the-art
approaches to show the effectiveness of our methodology. In
Sect. 4, the conclusion is given.
Sparse representation-based prognostics
Sparse representation theory
Recently, the sparse representation of signals is a hot spot.
Sparse representation is a signal reconstruction method
(Aharon et al. 2006). With an over-complete dictionary
D Rnk (k  n) that contains k basis as its columns, a
given signal y can be represented as a sparse linear combi-
nation of these basis: y Dx, satisfying y Dx2 .
are infinite solutions for the representation y Dx2 .
one. When the solution with the fewest number of nonzero
coefficients is pursued, the optimization model is called the
sparse representation model:
min x0 s.t. y Dx (1)
x
The form x0 counts the number of non-zero components
of x. Unfortunately, this is non-convex optimization because
x0 is non-convex, so the solution may be not unique. Can-
ds et al. (2006) proved that if the representation is sparse
enough, 0-norm is equivalent to 1-norm:
min x1 s.t. y Dx (2)
x
J Intell Manuf
The representation of signal y is like to give y a coding
on the basis or dictionary D, so sparse representation is also
vividly called sparse coding.
In pattern recognition area, sparse representation provides
a novel view to measure similarity. First, sparse representa-
tion sees signals as the sum of few basis in dictionary plus
some noises, so the model doesnt need prior knowledge or
distribution assumptions of signals. Secondly, sparse repre-
sentation can extract the semantic information behind signals
by pursuing the fewest number of basis to represent signals,
so the threshold is easier to determine than distance-based
similarity methods (Ren and Lv 2014). Due to those merits,
sparse representation is widely used in denoising (Elad and
Aharon 2006), super-resolution (Yang et al. 2010) and face
recognition (Wright et al. 2009) fields.
The main difference between pattern recognition and
prognostics is that the prognostics task is closely related to
time. So it is essential to put time attributes into the sparse
representation model for prognostics.
Another problem in sparse representation-based prognos-
tics is the choice of the over-complete dictionary. There are
mainly two ways to build one dictionary in todays dictionary
learning area. One is to choose pre-specified set of functions
such as wavelets, curvelets and contourlets as the dictionary.
Those fixed dictionaries are less adaptive for different types
of data. The other method is based on machine learning: the
dictionaries are learned from training data and more adap-
tive dictionaries can be acquired through learning process.
With the development of machine learning, various dictio-
nary learning methods have been introduced (Engan et al.
1999; Vidal et al. 2003).
Recently, a dictionary learning method called K-SVD has
proposed Aharon et al. (2006). K-SVD is a method itera-
tive between sparse coding process and dictionary learning
process to get a better dictionary. The optimization model is:
min Y D X 2F s.t. i, xi 0 < (3)
D,X
However, these dictionary learning methods above are not
suitable for prognostics even the pattern recognition tasks
Fig. 1 The flow chart of our
methodology
because the labels or category attributes of training samples
will be destroyed in the iterative processes.
Sparse representation based prognostics
Our SRP model includes three steps: the dictionary forming
step, the sparse representation step and the RUL evaluating
step (Fig. 1). In the dictionary forming step, a dictionary
is formed by features extracted from run-to-failure data. In
the sparse representation step, the sequential features from
sensor data are input into the sparse model and its represen-
tation weight xi is computed. In the RUL evaluating step, a
hierarchical Hough voting process is adopted to evaluate the
RUL. Two assumptions consistent to the prognostics tasks
are applied in hierarchical Hough voting process: (a) there
exists sequential relationships among training data: the train-
ing samples close in the dictionary are also close in time
domain; (b) the testing data are also sequential: the evalu-
ated RULs of adjacent testing samples should be close.
Dictionary forming
The first step of dictionary forming is data preprocessing to
reduce noise and improve computational efficiency. Conven-
tional data preprocessing methods include data denoising and
normalization. Then, the critical step is feature extraction. In
pattern recognition area, reasonable feature extraction can
reach desirable recognition rate. The degeneration of most
equipment follows a failure rate curve called bathtub curve
(see Fig. 2). And the prognostic task usually focuses on the
random failures and wear-out failures parts. So features that
have a consistent trend with the random failures and wear-
out failures parts can reflect the real degeneration process
and should be adopted. Just see Fig. 3 as an example: the
amplitude of one feature remains low at first and increases
sharply near the failure, which is consistent with the random
failures and wear-out failures parts of the bathtub curve.
Once features ( f 1 , f 2 , . . . , f n ) are extracted, the next step
is to form dictionary D for sparse representation model. As
introduced in Sect. 2.1, the aim of K-SVD dictionary learning
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where yi is one testing feature extracted from monitored data

at time node i, D is the dictionary formed in Sect. 2.2.1 and xi
is the corresponding sparse vector of yi at time node i. When
all the run-to-now testing features are represented, we arrange
the sparse vectors to form a sparse matrix as followed:

SM = [x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ] (6)

In SM, one column xi corresponds to the sparse coding of

Fig. 2 Bathtub curve
one testing sample y j in time node i.
Different from other data-driven models, our model seeks
14000
to mine the similarities between the testing samples in dic-
12000 tionary D and the training samples yi in the sense of sparse
10000
representation. As introduce in Sect. 2.1, the sparse repre-
sentations power of extracting the sematic information of
one feature

8000 signals can help us to measure the internal relationships

6000 between the testing and training samples so as to evaluate
the RUL.
4000

2000
RUL evaluation
0
0 200 400 600 800 1000
time node In Sect. 2.2.2, the run-to-now monitored data are projected
to a sequential sparse coding SM by sparse representation
Fig. 3 An example of good feature
model. In this part, we will evaluate the RUL using SM. Here,
we assume that there are two priors in RUL evaluation prob-
lems: one is that the training samples (run-to-failure data) are
method is to get such an effective dictionary that the represen-
sequential, and so the sparse representation of certain test-
tation of the signal on the dictionary is as sparse as possible.
ing samples from time node i should be represented mainly
In the process of iteration, the internal structure of basis is
using neighbor basis in dictionary D in Eq. 5; the second is
destroyed and the time sequence property of basis is also
that the testing samples are also sequential, and the neighbor
destroyed at the same time, so K-SVD dictionary learning
testing samples should have close RUL evaluation.
method is not suitable for prognostics tasks. For this rea-
Firstly, we introduce a transform called power transmitting
son, we form dictionary D in an easier but suitable way: just
operator (). The power transmitting operator of a vector
arranging the features in time order to form the dictionary to
v = [v1 , v2 , . . . , vm ] is:
hold the sequence property.

D = [ f1 , f2 , . . . , fn ] (4) 
n
|vk |
i = (7)
|k i| + 1
k=1
Sparse representation i
si = n (8)
i=1 i
In Sect. 2.2.1, the dictionary D for sparse representation has (v) = [s1 , s2 , . . . , sn ] (9)
been formed. This part projects every monitored data from
the under-prognosed machine to a sparse vector. First, the
features should also be extracted from these data the same To certain training sample in coding vector v, the weight of
way with run-to-failure data in Sect. 2.2.1. Every feature this sample in (v) depends on the value of itself as well as
can be seen as a testing sample whose RUL remains to be the value of its neighbors. The further one component is apart
evaluated. Then, we project these features to a sparse matrix from the component, the smaller its contribution to it. This is
using the following sparse representation model: consistent to our first assumption: the training samples (run-
to-failure data) are sequential, and if the component and its
neighbors have all high value, the weight of this component
min xi 1 s.t. yi Dxi  (5) should be high.
xi

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Then, we transform the coding matrix SM with the oper- 1

ator (v):
0.8

S M = [x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ] = [(x1 ), (x2 ), . . . , (xm )]

0.6
(10)

di
we call S M the dual-sequential matrix because the values 0.4

of one column reflect the sequential information of training

samples while the arrangement of the column reflects the 0.2

sequential relationship among testing samples.

When S M is computed, a hierarchical Hough voting 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
process is carried out to evaluate the RUL. i/N
First, a weighted Hough voting is undertaken in every
column of S M to evaluate the RUL of every testing sample Fig. 4 The trend of di with time
yi on time node i. Assuming xi = [s1 , s2 , . . . , sn ] is the ith
column in S M corresponding the testing sample yi at time
D = diag (d1 , d2 , . . . , dl ) (16)
node i, the RUL evaluation of yi is:
di = max (bln(a i), 0) (17)

n
ri = k sk (11) where l is the number of testing samples; b and a are experi-
k=1 enced parameters and in our experiment the following values
are adopted:
Once the RUL ri of every sequential input yi is computed,
we take another Hough voting process to determine the final 10
RUL of the machine or equipment under monitor. a= (18)
l
We define a rough RUL evaluation vector to represent the 1
evaluation of every single testing sample: b= (19)
ln(10)

Rrough = [r1 , r2 , . . . , rl ] (12) Then we can project the evaluated RUL on different time
nodes to now by timing the diagonal matrix D to get the final
where l is the total number of the testing samples. evaluated RUL vector:
Because the testing samples are sequential, there should
be sequential relationships among the evaluated RULs. We R= RD (20)
adopt a weighted median filtering process to smooth and give
sequential properties to the evaluated RULs: In Eq. 21 and Fig. 4, we can see that the near time nodes have
higher confidences, which is accordant with our assumptions.
 T At last, we undertake a Hough voting process to determine
rsi = w ri2 ri1 ri ri+1 ri+2 (13)
the final RUL of monitored machine:
where w is a weighted smoothing vector and in our experi- 1 

RUL = max(R, m) (21)
ment m
 
1 2 5 2 1 where m is the number of values involved in Hough voting
w= (14)
11 11 11 11 11 process and max(R, m) represents the maximal m values in
vector R.
Then we can get a smoothed vector R of evaluated RUL
vector Rr ough .
Example
R = [r s1 , r s2 , . . . , r sl ] (15)
In this section, we apply our methodology mentioned above
Whats more, because we want to evaluate the present to ball bearing remaining useful life. The experimental data
RUL, the latest evaluated RULs should have higher confi- set was provided by the FEMTO-ST institute Nectoux et al.
dence. To fully apply this property, we define a diagonal (2012) and this data set was adopted in 2012 PHM data
matrix first: challenge competition. There are six training sets covering

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run-to-failure data monitored during the bearings accelerated 3

life test and eleven test sets with truncated experimental data.
2.5
The data sets were monitored under three different loading
conditions: 2

Amplitude
Conditions 1: 1800 rpm and 4000 N; 1.5
Conditions 2: 1650 rpm and 4200 N;
1
Conditions 3: 1500 rpm and 5000 N.
0.5
Condition 1 and condition 2 provide two training sets and
require to estimate RUL of five testing sets, respectively. Con- 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000
dition 3 includes two training sets covering run-to-failure data Time Node
and only one testing sets remaining to be estimated.
The characterization of the bearings degradation is based Fig. 5 The rms amplitude with time
on two data types of sensors: vibration and temperature. The
vibration sensors consists of two miniature accelerometers 8
positioned at 90 to each other; the first is placed on the ver- 7
tical axis and the second is placed on the horizontal axis. The
6
two accelerometers are placed radially on the external race of
the bearing. The temperature sensor is an resistance temper- 5

Amplitude
ature detector (RTD) platinum PT100 (1/3 DIN class) probe, 4
which is place inside a hole close to the external bearings
3
ring. The acceleration measures are sampled at 25.6 kHz and
the temperature ones are sampled at 0.1 Hz. 2

1
Feature extraction and dictionary forming
0
0 200 400 600 800 1000
Feature extraction is an essential process in our RUL evalua- Time Node
tion methodology. Before feature extraction, median filter is
Fig. 6 The variance amplitude with time
undertaken to denoise. Then, various features are extracted
from vibration signals of the training bearings data in the 900
time and frequency domains (Li et al. 2012). As referred in
800
Sect. 2.2.1, we analyze the trend of these features and choose
700
features decreasing or increasing with time as the final fea-
tures. At last, we choose 26 features (13 for horizontal and the 600
Amplitude

other 13 for vertical vibration signals). Two pairs of features 500

are from time domain: root mean square (rms) and variance 400
(Figs. 5, 6); the other features are from frequency domain: one 300
pair of features are the energy spectrum after Fourier trans- 200
formation (Fig. 7) and the other ten pairs are the energy in the
100
approximate and detailed coefficients at the first five levels
0
of decomposition using wavelet decomposition (Figs. 8, 9). 0 200 400 600 800 1000
Once all the features are extracted, they are smoothed Time Node
using median filter. Then a normalization process is taken
Fig. 7 The energy spectrum with time
to bring these features to the same scale to reduce bias due
to features of large dynamic range. The normalized form of
one feature f ti [ f t1 , f t2 , . . . , f tn ] is: Sparse representation and RUL evaluation
f ti min j ( f t j )
f ii = (22) The features from testing samples are input into the sparse
max j ( f t j ) min j ( f t j )
representation model (Eq. 5) or the matrix form:
Then, these features from the training samples are arranged
in time order to form the dictionary. min M1 s.t. Y D X  (23)
M

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15000 Table 1 The comparison between CALCEs result and ours

Condition Error of CALAE (%) Our error (%)

10000 1 B1_3 37 4
Amplitude

B1_4 80 10
B1_5 9 19
B1_6 5 81
5000
B1_7 2 60
2 B2_3 64 5
B2_4 10 522
0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 B2_5 440 12
Time Node B2_6 49 7
B2_7 317 17
Fig. 8 The A1 energy with time
3 B3_3 90 16
4500 Score 0.3066 0.3587
4000
3500
3000 Result
Amplitude

2500
Using our methodology, we evaluated all the testing sets
2000
provided by the FEMTO-ST institute. According to the rule
1500
of FEMTS-ST institute (Nectoux et al. 2012), RUL results
1000 should be converted into percent errors of predictions:
500
0 i
ActRULi RUL
0 200 400 600 800 1000
%Eri = 100 (24)
Time Node ActRULi

Fig. 9 The D1 energy with time Then, the score of experiment i is calculated based on the
errors:
3000

RUL estimation of the single

ex p ln(0.5)(Eri /5) Eri 0

2500 Ai = (25)
ex p +ln(0.5)(Eri /20) Eri > 0
testing sample

2000

1500
The final score of all RUL estimates has been defined as
being the mean of all experiments score:
1000

500
0 i=1
0 200 400
Time Node of testing samples
Fig. 10 RUL estimation of testing samples
where X is the required sequential sparse coding matrix and
Y is the features matrix of testing samples arranged in time
order. Once the sparse matrix is get, the RUL can be evaluated
using our approach discussed in Sect. 2.2.3. The single esti-
mation of testing samples in set B1_4 can be seen in Fig. 10.
From Fig. 10, we can find that because the time nodes of
the latest testing samples are near the bearing failure bound-
ary time nodes, the RULs estimation of these testing samples
decreased quickly.
1 
11
Score = (Ai ) (26)
11
600 800 1000 1200
To demonstration the effectiveness of our methodology,
we contrast our result with that of Center for Advanced Life
Cycle Engineering (CALCE), University of Maryland who
won the 2012 PHM data challenge competition (Sutrisno
et al. 2012). The comparison is shown in Table 1.
And to make further comparisons with neural networks
based (Heimes 2008) and similarity based (Wang et al.
2008) algorithms, we compare our methodology with state-
of-the-art methods of these two algorithms that have nice
performances at PHM08 data challenge competition. The
result is shown in Table 2.
Whats more, to verify the efficiency of sparse represen-
tation in our methodology, we give the comparison between

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Table 2 The performance comparisons among monitoring data and the RUL estimation is also a new
Condition Error of Heimes Error of Wang Our error application field of sparse representation; second, the Hough
(2008) (%) et al. (2008) (%) (%) voting is used to utilize the sequential information among
monitoring data. The industry experiments have proven the
1 B1_3 46 57 4
efficiency of our methodology.
B1_4 63 59 10
B1_5 15 23 19
B1_6 78 17 81
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