Copyright © 2012 Qinming Liu and Ming Dong. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Health management for a complex nonlinear system is becoming more important for condition-based maintenance and minimizing the related risks and costs over its entire life. However, a complex nonlinear system often operates under dynamically operational and environmental conditions, and it subjects to high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability so that effective methods for online health management are still few now. This paper combines hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) with sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. HSMM is used to obtain the transition probabilities among health states and health state durations of a complex nonlinear system, while the SMC method is adopted to decrease the computational and space complexity, and describe the probability relationships between multiple health states and monitored observations of a complex nonlinear system. This paper proposes a novel method of multisteps ahead health recognition based on joint probability distribution for health management of a complex nonlinear system. Moreover, a new online health prognostic method is developed. A real case study is used to demonstrate the implementation and potential applications of the proposed methods for online health management of complex nonlinear systems.