Abstract
Remaining Useful Life (RUL) has become widely recognized as a key metric
for evaluating system reliability within the field of Prognostic and
Health Management (PHM). It plays a crucial role in predicting a
system’s health status and its expected lifespan. While significant
efforts have been directed towards accurately estimating RUL, the
process of decision-making regarding health management and potential
adjustments to equipment lifespan still poses questions. This study
introduces a state-space methodology designed to effectively manage RUL
and, thus, the end-of-life of a degrading system, particularly focusing
on controlled operation systems. Through an investigation of the
relationship between the operational dynamics of the system and its
aging process, the study specifically concentrates on regulating the
degradation rate experienced during operation. A robust design method of
an observer and a controller is presented to effectively govern the
degradation trajectory, allowing for the achievement of an acceptable
level of deterioration within a desired average lifetime. To demonstrate
the performance and practical application of the proposed approach, it
is applied to a variable-speed wind turbine with a flexible shaft
subjected to torsion effects. The results highlight the benefits of
using RUL control as a Health-Aware Control (HAC) strategy, aiming to
find an optimal balance between reliability and production objectives.
This study makes a valuable contribution to the field of reliability
engineering by providing insight into managing the end-of-life of
controlled processes suffering from aging. It is showed that the RUL
control problem can be conveniently expressed as the problem of
controlling a polytopic uncertain system. For this reason, a
discrete-time robust LQR controller design is presented for solving the
polytopic control design problem.