Linguistic model for axle fatigue

Army ground vehicles often operate in extremely severe environmental and battlefield conditions. Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) allows maintenance to be performed based on evidence of need provided by reliability modeling and/or other enabling technologies, thus reducing maintenance costs and increasing vehicle availability. A fuzzy model is developed to diagnose the axle fatigue of light trucks. The extraction of the fuzzy rules is based upon expert knowledge and a linear damage model. Training data will be used to modify the membership functions and the fuzzy If-Then rules to improve the quality of the fuzzy model for fault diagnostics. The improvement of the fuzzy model will be carried out using re-clustering operation and membership function optimization.