Hybrid approach for remaining useful life prediction of ball bearings

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction plays an important role in predictive maintenance systems to support decision-makers for arranging maintenance tasks and related resources. We propose a hybrid approach that is combined an exponential weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart for anomaly detection and machine learning models such as support vector regression (SVR) and random forest regression (RFR) with differential evolution (DE) algorithm to predict the RULs of ball bearings. Here, DE algorithm is used to find the optimal hyperparameters of SVR model. The datasets of ball bearings from the Prognostics Data Repository of NASA are used to compare the prediction performance of different methods. The degradation behavior of training data from the anomaly time to the end of life is used to transfer learning for the testing data in the SVR and RFR models. The results indicate that the proposed methods outperform the other four existing methods in terms of score. Therefore, the proposed hybrid approach is a reliable tool for the RUL prediction of ball bearings.