Remaining Useful Life Prediction for Multi-Component Stochastic Degrading Equipment under Competing Failure

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is the key to prognostics and health management (PHM). This paper addresses the multi-component competing failure problem and proposes a multi-component RUL prediction method based on the time-varying Copula function. In the proposed method, the dependent time-varying multi-component degradation model is built by the time-varying Copula function and the joint RUL distribution function of multi-component stochastic degrading equipment is accordingly derived. To implement the proposed method, the maximum likelihood estimation method is used to estimate the model's unknown parameters. Finally, the effectiveness of the multi-component RUL prediction method is demonstrated by the practical case of the gyroscope.