Dynamic predictive maintenance strategy for multi‐component system based on LSTM and hierarchical clustering

Abstract In recent years, there has been growing interest in employing predictive methods to forecast the remaining useful life of industrial equipment. However, the challenge lies in how to take advantage of the dynamic predictive information to facilitate the maintenance of decision‐making. This problem becomes particularly challenging for complex industrial systems consisting of multiple components with economic dependencies. This paper aims at providing an effective maintenance strategy for multi‐component systems based on predictive information, while considering economic dependencies among different system components. To this end, a dynamic predictive maintenance (PdM) strategy that minimizes the mean maintenance cost over a decision period is proposed, where both long‐term and short‐term policies are integrated into the decision‐making framework. Specifically, the long‐term policy is formulated using predictions derived from historical degradation data through a Long Short‐Term Memory (LSTM) model. Concurrently, real‐time monitoring data is employed to forecast imminent degradation in components, serving as a basis for determining the necessity of short‐term adjustments. This paper embeds the consideration of economic dependencies among components within the maintenance strategy design and employs hierarchical clustering to establish an effective and efficient maintenance grouping policy. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed strategy significantly outperforms conventional approaches, including block‐based and age‐based maintenance, resulting in substantial cost savings. The proposed strategy is also compared with a similar version without grouping, and the results verify the added value of the optimal maintenance grouping policy in cost reduction. Moreover, a comprehensive analysis of the proposed method is provided, including the impact of different inspection costs and inspection intervals on maintenance decision‐making, which can provide insightful guidance to various PdM scenarios in practice.