We pose the maintenance planning for systems using probabilistic Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prognostics as a renewal reward process. Data-driven probabilistic RUL prognostics are obtained using a Convolutional Neural Network with Monte Carlo dropout. The maintenance planning model is illustrated for aircraft turbofan engines. The results show that in the initial monitoring phase, the accuracy and sharpness of the RUL prognostics is relatively small. The maintenance of the engines is therefore scheduled far in the future. As the usage of the engine increases, the accuracy of the prognostics improves, while the sharpness remains relatively small. As soon as the estimated probability of the RUL is skewed towards 0, the maintenance planning model consistently indicates it is optimal to replace the engines immediately, i.e., "now". This shows that probabilistic RUL prognostics support an effective maintenance planning of the engines, despite being imperfect with respect to accuracy and sharpness. @en

The increasing availability of condition-monitoring data for components/systems has incentivized the development of data-driven Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prognostics in the past years. However, most studies focus on point RUL prognostics, with limited insights into the uncertainty associated with these estimates. This limits the applicability of such RUL prognostics to maintenance planning, which is per definition a stochastic problem. In this paper, we therefore develop probabilistic RUL prognostics using Convolutional Neural Networks. These prognostics are further integrated into maintenance planning, both for single and multiple components. We illustrate our approach for aircraft turbofan engines. The results show that the optimal replacement time for the engines is close to the lower bound of the 99% confidence interval of the RUL estimates. We also show that our proposed maintenance approach leads to a cost reduction of 53% compared to a traditional Time-based maintenance strategy. Moreover, compared with the ideal case when the true RUL is known in advance (perfect RUL prognostics), our approach leads to a limited number of failures. Overall, this paper proposes an end-to-end framework for data-driven predictive maintenance for multiple components, and showcases the potential benefits of data-driven predictive maintenance on cost and reliability.

@en