Knowledge-based prognostics and health management of a pumping system under the linguistic decision-making context

The process industry implements important maintenance strategies on the basis of the health status of system operation to reduce engineering maintenance cost and concurrently ensure reliability and safety. This study presents an architecture for knowledge-based prognostics and health management (K-PHM) by applying the trapezoidal interval type-2 fuzzy linguistic term sets. The proposed K-PHM methodology successfully provides operational information for diagnostics, prognostics, and subsequent actionable knowledge for health management in subjective decision making. It emphasizes knowledge-driven maintenance strategies to increase system reliability and safety within linguistic decision making. The main objective of this study is to focus on the uncertainty within the knowledge formation derived from data and subsequent information expressed with linguistic terms generated from domain experts in the K-PHM methodology. Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic reasoning techniques are used in conjunction to enhance the capability of handling uncertainty throughout the PHM process. The effectiveness of the proposed K-PHM is verified with the authentic case study for the predictive maintenance of a chemical pumping system against abnormal vibration.