Prognostics of health status of multi-component systems with degradation interactions

Many models and methodologies in order to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of a critical component are investigated nowadays. However, estimating remaining useful life of multi-component systems is still an under explored area, especially when there are interdependencies among the components of these systems. Practically, prognostics can be quite complicated when there is absence of prior knowledge about these interactions. To optimize the availability and reliability of the system, it is required to embed a dependency model that implements component strength and the component´s health status. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed in order to emphasize the importance of interactions between complex system´s components in the RUL´s calculating. The effectiveness of the approach is judged by applying it to numerical studies in order to estimate system´s remaining useful life.