Residual-life estimation for components with non-symmetric priors

Condition monitoring uses sensory signals to assess the health of engineering systems. A degradation model is a mathematical characterization of the evolution of a condition signal. Our recent research focuses on using degradation models to compute residuallife distributions for degrading components. Residual-life distributions are important for providing probabilistic estimates of failure time for use in maintenance planning and spare parts inventory management. To obtain residual-life distributions, our earlier work assumed the degradation model’s stochastic parameters to be normally distributed. This paper investigates the performance of these residual-life distributions when the underlying normality assumptions are not satisfied. The paper also develops methods for estimating residual-life when the stochastic parameters of the degradation model follow more general distributions.