Copyright © 2010 Ming Dong. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The primary objective of engineering asset management is to optimize assets service delivery potential and to minimize the related risks and costs over their entire life through the development and application of asset health and usage management in which the health and reliability prediction plays an important role. In real-life situations where an engineering asset operates under dynamic operational and environmental conditions, the lifetime of an engineering asset is generally described as monitored nonlinear time-series data and subject to high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability. It has been proved that application of data mining techniques is very useful for extracting relevant features which can be used as parameters for assets diagnosis and prognosis. In this paper, a tutorial on nonlinear time-series data mining in engineering asset health and reliability prediction is given. Besides that an overview on health and reliability prediction techniques for engineering assets is covered, this tutorial will focus on concepts, models, algorithms, and applications of hidden Markov models (HMMs) and hidden semi-Markov models (HSMMs) in engineering asset health prognosis, which are representatives of recent engineering asset health prediction techniques.