Residual Life Estimation Based on a Generalized Wiener Process with Skew-normal Random Effects

For reliability-critical and expensive products, it is necessary to estimate their residual lives based on available information, such as the degradation data, so that proper maintenance actions can be arranged to reduce or even avoid the occurrence of failures. In this work, by assuming that the product-to-product variability of the degradation is characterized by a skew-normal distribution, a generalized Wiener process-based degradation model is developed. Following that, the issue of residual life (RL) estimation of the target product is addressed in detail. The proposed degradation model provides greater flexibility to capture a variety of degradation processes, since several commonly used Wiener process-based degradation models can be seen as special cases. Through the EM algorism, the population-based degradation information is used to estimate the parameters of the model. Whenever new degradation measurement information of the target product becomes available, the degradation model is first updated based on the Bayesian method. In this way, the RL of the target product can be estimated in an adaptive manner. Finally, the developed methodology is demonstrated by a simulation study.