Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252

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Expert Systems with Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

Design of a reconfigurable prognostics platform for machine tools

Linxia Liao *, Jay Lee
NSF I/UCR Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Univ. of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: For decades, researchers and practitioners have been trying to develop and deploy prognostics technol-
Prognostics ogies with ad hoc and trial-and-error approaches. These efforts have resulted in limited success, due to
Machine performance assessment the fact that it lacks a systematic approach and platform in deploying the right prognostics tools for
Reconfigurable platform the right applications. This paper introduces a methodology for designing a reconfigurable prognostics
Machine tool
platform (RPP) which can be easily and effectively used to assess and predict the performance of machine
tools. RPP can be installed on the equipment and it has the prognostic capabilities to convert the data into
performance-related information. The equipment performance information can then be integrated into
the enterprise asset management system for maintenance decision making through the Internet. Two
industrial cases are used to validate the effectiveness of applying the RPP for different prognostic appli-
cations as well as the reconfigurable capabilities of the proposed RPP.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction implemented and maintained because of the lack of expert knowl-

Unexpected machine tool downtime is still one of the major is-
sues in impacting machining productivity in industry. For example,
1 min of downtime in an automotive manufacturing plant could
cost as much as $20,000 (Spiewak et al., 2000). The breakdown of
one machine may result in the halt of the whole production line
in a manufacturing facility. Purely reactive (reactive maintenance)
or blindly proactive (preventive maintenance) maintenance are
existing widely in today’s industry, while both of these scenarios
could be extremely wasteful. Predictive maintenance focuses on
failure prediction in order to prevent failure in advance and offer
sufficient information to improve planning, while it is hard to be
properly established and effectively implemented because of the
lack of expert knowledge for data analysis or well-designed system
architecture.
Traditional Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) systems have
been implemented in manufacturing plants to continuously deliver
data related to the machine’s status and performance. The problem
is that field engineers, practitioners and management staff are not
able to make effective use of huge amount of data obtained by CBM
systems to accurately detect the degradation status of the equip-
ment, not mention to be aware of the degradation trend which will
lead to catastrophic failure eventually. The decision making in CBM
focuses on predictive maintenance (Lee et al., 2006). Predictive
maintenance focuses on failure prediction in order to prevent fail-
ure in advance and offer sufficient information to improve plan-
ning, while it is hard to be properly established and effectively
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: liaolinxia@gmail.com (L. Liao).
edge for data analysis or well-designed system architecture.
In the literature, a large variety of prognostic approaches and
stand-alone platforms have been studied and implemented for dif-
ferent applications. Ge et al. (2004) presented a support vector ma-
chine (SVM) based method for fault diagnosis in sheet metal
stamping processes and a shop floor application was implemented
by using a PC and additional data acquisition equipment. Li et al.
(2005) proposed a hidden Markov model (HMM)-based fault diag-
nosis in speed-up and speed-down process for rotary machinery. In
the implementation of the system, one PC was used for data sam-
pling and another PC was used for data storage and analysis. A net-
work communication was also set up between the two computers
for data transmission. Wu and Chow (2004) presented a self-orga-
nizing map (SOM) based radial-basis-function (RBF) neural net-
work method for induction machine fault detection. The system
was implemented by utilizing a PC and additional data acquisition
equipment. Those stand-alone platforms have been validated to be
effective for specific applications, while they may not be applicable
when the application conditions change and it is generally difficult
to integrate them into other systems and keep them well
maintained.
In recent years, some maintenance system architectures and
case studies have been proposed and studied by many researchers.
Wang et al. (2004) presented a web-enabled remote monitoring,
diagnosis and collaborative maintenance system. Data was col-
lected from six monitoring points on an industrial machine
through a DAQ server and sent to a web-based diagnosis system
for analysis. Chen et al. (2005) proposed a five-layer system archi-
tecture for remote monitoring and e-maintenance. Two perfor-
mance monitoring systems for an elevator and a spindle were

0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.05.004
 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252
developed and presented, respectively. Qu et al. (2006) presented a
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) – based re-
mote diagnostic system for large scale distributed rotary machines.
In the implementation of the diagnosis platform for milling and
turbine machines, data was accumulated and preprocessed in the
factory level and was sent to remote diagnosis center for further
analysis and decision making. Han and Yang (2006) proposed an
e-maintenance system integrated with several advances tech-
niques (i.e. wireless, web, etc). The system included two subsys-
tems: maintenance center and local maintenance. The former
one consisted of the maintenance strategies which are imple-
mented and evaluated by the later one. The feasibility of the sys-
tem was demonstrated by a case study of fault diagnosis of an
introduction motor. Those proposed architectures can be applied
to large-scale monitoring enterprise applications and they are, to
some extent, easier to be integrated into other systems than the
stand-alone systems. However, the local data analysis capability
was not well addressed. Most of the existing proposed mainte-
nance architectures rely on the remote data analysis systems for
performance assessment and decision making. Large amount of
data transmission over the network raises the problems of network
congestion and issues of data storage. Another issue is that the
reconfigurable framework of the data analysis software modules
was not well emphasized. The developed systems are usually very
hard to be maintained due to the difficulty to integrate the newly
developed software modules into the existing systems or the lack
of development experience.
As for standardization, Kothamasu et al. (2006) discussed sev-
eral organizations who have been putting effort to develop stan-
dard specifications in the maintenance and control arena. Lebold
et al. (2002) proposed a typical open architecture, which is called
OSA-CBM (Open System Architecture for Condition-Based Mainte-
nance), for machinery monitoring and diagnosis. The purpose was
to demonstrate a software structure which facilitates the interop-
erability of CBM software modules. The OSA-CBM architecture is
not exclusive to any specific software implementation technology.
Yu et al. (2007) presented the implementation of Internet-based
remote monitoring and diagnostic platform for key equipment
according to the OSA-CBM architecture. Several algorithms for
fault diagnosis and condition prediction were utilized to realize a
maintenance support system for distributed power-generation
systems. However, due to the lack of local data processing capabil-
ities, the data was transferred to remote computers for further
analysis, which may incur the network traffic problems and the
lag of maintenance decision making. Furthermore, how to reconfig-
ure the data analysis software modules for various applications
was not addressed in detail.
Much progress has been made in the literature, while two major
issues still remain:
 Most existing approaches still focus on failure detection and
fault isolation instead of prognostics. Also, many algorithms
are application specific. A scalable prognostic toolbox, which is
used for equipment performance degradation assessment and
prediction, becomes necessary to automatically convert machin-
ery data into performance-related information.
 There is no available prognostic platform that can easily adapt to
new application environments and quickly be applied to various
machine tool applications.
This paper proposes a systematic approach for designing a
reconfigurable prognostics platform (RPP) which can be quickly
and effectively deployed for various machine tool prognostic appli-
cations. A toolbox, which is called Watchdog AgentÒ (Djurdjanovic
et al., 2003), is applied to converts machinery data into perfor-
mance-related information. An agent-based reconfigurable frame-
241
work makes the RPP easily to be adapted to various prognostics
applications. To validate the effectiveness of using RPP for machine
tool prognostic applications, two industrial case studies are pre-
sented to illustrate how to apply RPP to applications of automatic
tool changer (ATC) and spindle bearing health monitoring and
prognostics, respectively.
2. Design of the reconfigurable prognostics platform (RPP)
The proposed approach is for designing prognostic systems for
machine tool applications. The RPP is a reconfigurable platform
which integrates both hardware and prognostic software. The plat-
form utilizes computing, communication and data analysis tech-
nologies to assess and predict the equipment performance. The
RPP contains an embedded prognostic toolbox (Watchdog AgentÒ)
which converts multi-sensory data into machine performance-re-
lated information. Advanced data processing and autonomous
prognostics methods are developed to facilitate the plug-and-play
approach in which the RPP can be set up and run with the mini-
mum need for expert knowledge or human intervention.
2.1. A prognostic toolbox – Watchdog AgentÒ
The Watchdog AgentÒ toolbox, developed by the NSF Center for
Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS), is able to convert relevant
machinery data into performance-related health features and
quantitatively assess the machine’s performance/health index. Fur-
thermore, the toolbox also contains algorithms that can predict the
degradation trends in order to provide valuable information for the
maintenance practitioners to take proactive actions before poten-
tial failures occur. As illustrated in Fig. 1, data can be obtained from
the embedded sensors on the machine tools and maintenance re-
cords as well as manually input working conditions. These data
are transformed into multiple-regime (e.g. high-speed cutting
and low-speed cutting, etc.) features by selecting appropriate algo-
rithms for signal processing and feature extraction. In the feature
space, performance/health indices are obtained by statistically
detecting the deviation of the real-time features from baseline by
selecting proper health assessment algorithms. The future perfor-
mance degradation tendency is predicted by applying appropriate
performance prediction algorithms to the feature space or health
indices. A health feature radar chart, which shows the health con-
dition of all monitored critical components of the machine tool, is
then presented for in a user-friendly interface for field engineers
and management staff to make maintenance decisions.
As illustrated in Table 1, the Watchdog AgentÒ toolbox consists
of various algorithms for machine prognostics, which mainly fo-
cuses on the following four areas: signal processing and feature
extraction, health assessment, performance prediction and diagno-
sis. A brief introduction of these four sets of tools will be given as
follows.
Signal processing and feature extraction tools are used for decom-
posing the sensory data into multi-dimensional feature space that
is most related to the performance of components of the machine
tool. For example, time domain analysis directly compares the time
waves of two different signals. Fast Fourier transform (FFT), which
is a typical frequency domain analysis algorithm, decomposes a
waveform into a sum of sinusoids with different frequencies. An
example can be found in Schoen and Habetler (1995) which de-
scribes using spectrum analysis to detect rotor fault in induction
machines. Time frequency analysis and wavelet/wavelet packet
analysis can be used to capture the dynamic characteristics of
the non-stationary data (with frequency component changes over
time). Wavelet packet analysis was proposed in Yen and Lin
(2000) to extract time-frequency information form vibration signa-
242 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252
Fig. 1. Flowchart of Watchdog AgentÒ to convert data into performance-related information (Liao & Lee, 2008).
Table 1
Prognostic algorithms in the Watchdog AgentÒ toolbox (Liao & Lee, 2008).
Signal processing and feature extraction tools
Time domain analysis
Frequency domain analysis
Time-frequency analysis
Wavelet/wavelet packet analysis
Principal component analysis (PCA)
Performance prediction tools
Autoregressive moving average (ARMA)
Elman recurrent neural network
Fuzzy logic
Match matrix
ture. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used algo-
rithm to reduce the dimension of the feature space or data by
transforming the original high-dimensional data into a new group
of variables which are uncorrelated to each other. PCA was used in
Wang and Cui (2005) as a sensor fault detection and diagnosis
method for centrifugal chiller systems.
Health assessment tools are used for evaluating the health condi-
tion of the machine tools by calculating the overlap between the
real-time feature space and that during normal product operation.
This overlap is continuously transformed into a confidence value
(CV), following Lee (1996), ranging from 0 to 1 (which indicates
unacceptable and normal machine performance, respectively) over
time. CV quantitatively evaluates the deviation of the recent behav-
ior from normal/baseline behavior. For example, logistic regression
algorithm can convert multi-sensory data into a probability-based
output which is constrained between 0 and 1. It requires data to
be available both in normal operating condition and unacceptable
condition. Logistic regression was proposed in Yan and Lee (2005)
for assessing machine performance using a case study of an elevator
door. Statistical pattern recognition calculates the overlap between
the most recent behavior and the normal/baseline behavior, which
Health assessment tools
Logistic regression
Statistical pattern recognition
Feature map pattern matching (self-organizing maps)
Neural network
Gaussian mixture model (GMM)
Diagnosis tools
Support vector machine (SVM)
Feature map pattern matching (self-organizing maps)
Bayesian belief network (BBN)
Hidden Markov model (HMM)
requires the distribution of features be appropriately Gaussian and
only description in the normal operating condition is required. A
statistical pattern recognition method, which calculates the statis-
tical overlap of Gaussians describing the most recent and normal
operating behavior, was described in Djurdjanovic et al. (2002)
for tool wear monitoring on a CNC lathe machine.
Diagnosis tools are used for analyzing the patterns embedded in
the data/features to determine the root causes of previous ob-
served faults or degradation. For example, Bayesian belief network
(BBN) uses a directed graphical model to represent joint distribu-
tion of different events. The structural characteristics make BBN
a very powerful diagnostic algorithm that can handle large proba-
bility distributions, especially for a complex system with a large
number of variables. An example can be found in Romessis and
Mathioudakis (2006) for jet engine gas path fault diagnosis. Sup-
port vector machine (SVM) is a binary classification algorithm in
which a linearly inseparable problem can be solved by using an
appropriate kernel function to project the data into a higher
dimensional space where a hyper-linear boundary is possible.
SVM was proposed in Yuan et al. (2004) for fault detection and
diagnosis for electromechanical systems.
 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252
Performance prediction tools are used for predicting the trend of
equipment signals or health indices over time and extrapolating
the equipment behaviors in the future. For example, auto-regres-
sive moving average (ARMA) algorithm is applicable to predict
the performance of linear time-invariant systems whose perfor-
mance features display stationary behavior (without frequent
components change over time). The details and applications of
ARMA can be found in Pandit and Wu (1993). Elman recurrent neu-
ral network (ERNN) with backward propagation has its own spe-
cialty in non-linear curve fit. It can be used to forecast the health
indices of highly dynamic systems and it has the capability to yield
good long term prediction. An example can be found in Yu et al.
(2006) using recurrent neural network for feature signature predic-
tion of a boring process.
Those algorithms will be integrated into the RPP software
framework as components, which will be further described in Sec-
tion 2.2. In order to automatically choose the most appropriate
algorithms for a predetermined application, Quality Function
Deployment (QFD)-based algorithm selection method is devel-
oped. QFD was developed by Yoji Akao in the 1960s and it provides
a structured framework for concurrent engineering that ensures
that the ‘‘voice of the customer” is incorporated into all phases of
product development (Govers, 1996). The purpose of utilizing the
QFD method here is to construct a relationship between the user’s
requirements or application conditions and the appropriate tools.
In the implementation of QFD, each tool in the Watchdog AgentÒ
toolbox is assigned a weight representing the correlation of the
tool with the specific application conditions such as characteristics
of the signal (e.g. stationary or non-stationary), system knowledge
(e.g. enough or limited), data dimension (e.g. scalar or multi-
dimensional) and so on. The QFD method is used to calculate a final
weight for each tool under the constraints of user-defined condi-
tion priorities. The tool with the highest final weight is then chosen
as the most appropriate tool. The implementation details can be
referenced to Armacost et al. (1994).
2.2. Reconfigurable prognostic software architecture of RPP
The RPP has an agent-based reconfigurable software framework
which is shown in Fig. 2. There are three main agents in the recon-
figurable software framework, system agent (SA), knowledge-data-
base agent (KA) and executive agent (EA), which play important
roles in the software reconfigurable processes. The primary func-
Fig. 2. Reconfigurable prognostic software architecture for RPP.
243
tion of SA is to manage both the system resources (e.g. memory
and disk capacity) and device hardware (e.g. data acquisition board
and wireless board). If a request is received to generate an EA at the
initial stage or to modify the EA at the runtime stage, SA creates a
vacant agent first. With interaction with KA, SA assigns system re-
sources to the agent and executes it to be autonomous. SA can also
communicate with and receive requests from other SAs in the net-
work. KA interacts with the knowledge database to obtain decision
making support. It provides component dependencies and model
parameters to perform a specific machine tool monitoring and
prognostics task. KA also provides coded modules which can be
downloaded from the knowledge database to create a functional
EA. The flowchart of the program is shown in Fig. 3.
The states executed by different agents are marked with differ-
ent colors. After the system starts, SA and KA are automatically
generated. At the initialization stage, KA interacts with the knowl-
edge database to obtain knowledge rules, code modules and
parameters. SA generates a vacant EA first and then initializes
the hardware resources and loads the necessary algorithm compo-
nents according to the knowledge obtained from KA. EA will auton-
omously and repeatedly perform the health monitoring and
prognostic tasks with the algorithms in the algorithm toolbox until
a stop task or reconfiguration request is received. If an alarm is oc-
curred, EA will send the alarm before it sends the health informa-
tion through the Internet. One thing needs to be noticed is that
when SA receives a reconfiguration request, it will terminate the
existing runtime EA and generate a new EA by interacting with KA.
There are three main remote application servers which are
knowledge base and code library server, application and authenti-
cation server, and information database. Those web-based applica-
tions are built based on a multi-tier architecture including
presentation tier, application tier and data tier. This is an open, dis-
tributed approach that separates the ‘fat’ client into two parts –
user interface and logic processing (TonyLiu & William Xu, 2001).
In this case, the user interface in the presentation tier consists of
applications in the enterprise layer as described in Section 2.1.
Application and authentication server functions as middleware in
the application tier to provide services for data requests between
the users and the databases. Information database and knowledge
base and code library server is database server in the data tier. The
three-tier architecture allows faster response and processing of
user’s requests (TonyLiu & William Xu, 2001). The three-tier struc-
ture and the request/response flowchart are shown in Fig. 4.
244 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252

Fig. 3. The program flowchart of the RPP.

Fig. 4. Three-tier architecture for remote applications.

The web-based applications in the presentation tier include the by utilizing Microsoft ActiveX control technique which can be
software to display the equipment health information, look embedded in the Internet browser. Active Server Pages
through historical information, and input engineering tool selec- (ASP) + Microsoft SQL database techniques are also used to develop
tion rules and so on. The web-based application was implemented the web-based applications.
 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252
Knowledge base and code library server has two main tasks. The
first one is to accumulate the rules or experience to deal with spe-
cial data and specific applications. A selection tool is running on
this server and provides guidance service to select appropriate
tools for different prognostics tasks. It prioritizes all the algorithms
according to the specific application situation and chooses the
tools with the highest priority in signal processing and feature
extraction, health assessment and diagnosis and performance pre-
diction. The SA on RPP will generate EA based on the guidance of
the knowledge base. The rules to select tools can also be input
manually from the web-based user interface. The second task of
the knowledge base and code library server is to save all the code
modules of the algorithms in the DLL format. The code modules
can be downloaded to the RPP when the environment or condition
of the applications changes. All the requests/responses associated
with the knowledge base and code library server go through the
application and authentication server.
Application and authentication server provides services for data
requests between the users, RPP and the databases on the network
and verifies the identities of the Internet users before they get ac-
cess to the RPP or databases. Before an Internet user gets access to
the embedded web server on RPP, the application and authentica-
tion server will verify the user’s identity on the information data-
base to decide whether further access is allowed. Application and
authentication server also provides identity verification for users
who tend to access the data saved on the information database.
After the user’s identity is verified, application and authentication
server will redirect the request to corresponding server or RPP if
the user has the appropriate access right. When the application
and authentication server receives the response from the server
or RPP, it will redirect the response to the corresponding user.
Information database includes a CBM system which incorpo-
rates all the health assessment and predicted information gener-
ated by RPP for all the monitored machines in the plant. The
CBM system follows the MIMOSA standards, which makes it easy
to integrate the information converted by RPP. The information
database can be a certain Computerized Maintenance Management
System (CMMS) or enterprise level database containing the asset
information. Information database also contains a database which
saves all the user identification information such as user name,
password, and department and so on.
2.3. Hardware integration for RPP
According to the roles described above, the RPP hardware plat-
form should have necessary data acquisition, computation and com-
munication capabilities. Considering both the local data processing
and the reconfigurable requirements, the hardware platform must
have high computational performance and good extension capabil-
ity. A PC/104 main board is selected as the computational platform.
PC/104 architecture is a popular standardized embedded platform
for small computing modules typically used in industrial applica-
tions. With the Windows XP embedded system running on it, all
Win32 compatible software modules are supported. The operating
system and the programs are stored in a 1 GB compact flash card.
A PCM-3718HG-B DAQ Card is chosen as the analog to digital data
acquisition hardware which has 12-bit sampling accuracy and sup-
ports various data acquisition methods such as software triggering,
interrupt, and direct memory access (DMA). The DAQ card is con-
nected to the main board via a compatible PC/104 extension slot.
A PC/104 wireless board and PC/104 GPRS (General Packet Radio
Service) module can also be selected to equip the integrated hard-
ware platform with wireless and GPRS communication capability
if necessary. These communication boards are also connected to
the main board with compatible PC/104 extension slots.
245
3. Industrial case studies using RPP
Two industrial cases (a. automatic tool changer health monitor-
ing and prognostics; b. spindle bearing health monitoring and
prognostics) will be presented to validate the effectiveness of
applying the RPP to different applications. The description of the
case studies will follow the sequence: (1) system setup; (2) data
processing which includes signal processing and feature extrac-
tion, health assessment and performance prediction. Different
algorithms and results are elaborated for each case study; (3) user
interface. At the end of this section, a reconfigurable capability
experiment is carried out to show the efficiency of reconfiguring
the RPP for various applications.
3.1. Automatic tool changer (ATC) health monitoring
Machining systems, such as Computer Numerical Control
(CNC) machine tools, are used for independent parts machining,
tooling fabrication and are therefore integrated into the manu-
facture of products. The breakdown of one machine tool may re-
sult in the halt of the whole production line in a manufacturing
facility. From the manufacturer’s maintenance records, ATC is
one of the components which fail the most. In this case, both
the health condition of the mechanical part and the electrical
part are monitored and results are fused to assess the health
condition of the ATC. Multiple sensory data is obtained as the in-
put of the RPP which will convert data into health information
for maintenance decision making. The data is processed locally
on the RPP and the health information is then published to the
Internet.
3.1.1. System setup and data acquisition
Both mechanical and electrical degradation are taken into con-
sideration in this case study. For mechanical part, the behavior of
the vibration signals will change significantly if the ATC develops
a mechanical defect such as cam wear, tool drop and tool change
position error and so on. Hence vibration data is obtained to anal-
ysis the mechanical degradation of the ATC. For electrical part, if
the control logic or the Programming Logic Control (PLC) performs
abnormally, the timing of the control steps will deviate from the
normal condition. Therefore, timing signals from the controller
are also monitored to detect the degradation of the ATC.
As shown in Fig. 5, a Kistler 8141A1 accelerometer is installed
on the spindle housing to obtain the vibration signals from the ma-
chine tool test-bed. The raw data goes through the Kistler 5127B01
conditioner box to the RPP by using Sensory Data Acquisition com-
ponent. ATC timing widows from the Fanuc controller are also ob-
tained via an Ethernet connection to the RPP through OPC Process
Data Acquisition component. The vibration sampling rate is 10 kHz
and the controller signal sampling rate is 75 Hz. The RPP is con-
nected to the Internet through a switch and a router. After the data
is converted into health information, the information is published
to Internet and can be accessed remotely by a web browser appli-
cation from the workstation.
Vibration signals from the accelerometer, in both a normal con-
dition and a faulty condition, are obtained and shown in Fig. 6a. It
is not easy to tell which one is in a normal condition and which one
is in a faulty condition by just looking at the data.
In this case, timing signals from the controller are also collected.
In Fig. 6b, 15 signals, which are T-code finish keep, Magazine count,
ATC holder down 1, ATC holder up 1, ATC holder down 2, ATC
holder up 2, M06 cycle run, M06 arm turn 65 command, M06
arm turn command, M06 arm turn original command, Arm origin
detect, Arm middle detect, Arm stop detect, Tool clamp and Tool
unclamp, are utilized in this case study.
246 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252
Fig. 5. System setup for ATC health monitoring.
3.1.2. Signal processing and feature extraction by wavelet packet
analysis
Usually, the vibration signals of defective components are
highly structured and can be grouped into two categories: sus-
tained defects and intermittent defects (Paul, 1995). For sustained
defects, Fourier-based analysis, which uses sinusoidal functions as
base functions, provides an ideal candidate for extraction of these
narrow-band signals (Yen & Lin, 2000). For intermittent defects,
signals often demonstrate a non-stationary and transient nature
(Yen & Lin, 2000). In this case, as we can see in Fig. 6a, the raw
vibration data is non-stationary as it contains two major impacts.
Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT), using a rich library of redundant
bases with arbitrary time-frequency resolution, enables the extrac-
tion of features from signals that combine non-stationary and sta-
tionary characteristics (Sun & Chang, 2002). Hence, wavelet packet
transform is used to decompose the raw data and the energy of
each node at the resolution level can be calculated. The decompo-
sition level is chosen as 4 according to experience and the number
of the energy nodes is 16.
The problem remains that how to decide how many features
should be chosen for next step, which is health assessment. Princi-
pal Component Analysis (PCA) method is used to projects the fea-
Fig. 6. Raw data for ATC health monitoring.
ture space to a lower dimensional space containing 95% of the
variation information of the original feature space. In this applica-
tion, the Karhunen-Loève Transform (KLT) takes the projection of
the 16-dimensional energy components to a 2-dimensional feature
space.
For the timing signals, status 5 (ATC holder down 2) and status
13 (Arm stop detect), which represent the time span of the tool
topple down action and the duration of the arm rotation action,
are selected as two independent features of the input for a logistic
regression health assessment algorithm. These two features are se-
lected because they are the most critical ones indicating the run-
ning status of the ATC. Together with the 2-dimensional
projected features by PCA, a 4-dimensional feature space is ex-
tracted from the raw data as input for health assessment
algorithms.
3.1.3. Health assessment by logistic regression
After the feature spaces for both normal and faulty condition
are obtained, the next step is to use the extracted feature spaces
as the input of the health assessment model to evaluate the health
condition of the ATC. In this case, both the normal and faulty data
are available and the health assessment task is to determine either
the ATC is in normal condition or faulty condition according to the
real-time data. Logistic regression is a robust tool that can easily
represent multiple variables as a dichotomous problem. Hence, it
is chosen as the health assessment model. The goal of logistic
regression is to find the best fitting model to describe the relation-
ship between the categorical characteristic of dependent variable
and a set of independent variables (Yan & Lee, 2005). The maxi-
mum likelihood estimate method is used to estimate the parame-
ter values that maximize the probability of the observed data by
iterative steps.
The training datasets (40 datasets from normal condition and
35 from faulty condition) are used to train the logistic regression
model and 280 datasets are used for validation. In the test, feature
space is extracted from the raw data by using the method de-
scribed in Section 3.1.2. Fig. 7 shows the confidence value curve
of the ATC over time. The drop of the confidence value at cycle
251 was caused by the drop of the air pressure at that time.
3.1.4. Performance prediction by neural network
Due to its own specialty like non-linear curve fitting, neural net-
work (NN) is widely used in industrial fields. NN is an effective
algorithm to predict complex system behaviors which involve
non-linear behaviors and unstable processes. It is able to take large
amount of historical data and can achieve adequate accuracy for
 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252
0.8
0.6
CV
0.4
0.2
0
0 50 100 150 200 250
Cycle
Fig. 7. Confidence value curve.
long term prediction. In the case study, NN model is selected for
performance prediction.
Confidence value (CV) can be used to indicate the health condi-
tion of the ATC. The degradation of the ATC can be clearly seen
from the curve of the confidence value over time. In the experi-
ment, the air pressure is adjusted to decrease gradually to cause
the ATC function abnormally. The historical 170 cycles’ confidence
value is used for performance prediction. The performance of 40
steps (from cycle 190) ahead is predicted by using an NN model.
60 samples are selected from the historical health indices. A 3-
layer neural network, which has 105 neurons in the input layer
and one neuron in the output layer, is trained with the historical
data. In order to decide the number of the neurons in the hidden
layer, the number of the hidden layer increases from 3 to 12 in
the experiment. Five trials are carried out for each number of the
hidden layer. The NN model which achieves the minimum mean
square error (MSE) is selected as the final model for performance
prediction. Finally, the number of the neurons in the hidden layer
is selected as 7.
Then the trained NN model is used to predict the confidence va-
lue of the next 40 cycles from cycle 191. The results are shown in
Fig. 8. The star points are the predicted results. The MSE is 0.0091.
The results show that the NN model can predict the degradation
trend of the health indices of the ATC. The time consumed in online
testing using RPP is shown in Table 2.
3.1.5. Application user interface
In this case, a real-time web application for remote monitoring
and machine health assessment is built via using an ActiveX con-
trol which is used as an embedded component of Internet Explorer
browser. Fig. 9a shows the results of the signal processing and fea-
ture extraction. Wavelet energy feature of each decomposed node
is shown by a bar chart. Fig. 9b shows a demonstration of the web
application. Machine health information can be accessed from the
Internet explorer browser. The curve is the confidence value which
indicates the health condition of the ATC. The drop of the confi-
dence value at cycle 239 is because of the drop of the air pressure
at that time.
3.2. Spindle bearing health monitoring and prognostics
Bearings are critical components in rotating machines, as their
failures could lead to a sequence of events that could cause serious
damage in machines on the production lines. Detection of bearing
247
300
Fig. 8. Performance prediction results.
faults has been gaining importance in recent years because of its
detrimental effect on the reliability of rotating machines (Prabha-
kar et al., 2002). In this case, vibration data is acquired from the
spindle bearing housing and transferred to the RPP. The vibration
signals are used for evaluating the health condition of the bearing.
Performance prediction method is then applied to predict the fu-
ture feature space based on which health assessment method is
used to assess the future performance.
3.2.1. System setup and data acquisition
In the case study, Rexnord ZA-2115 bearing is used for a run-to-
failure test. As shown in Fig. 10, an accelerometer is installed on
the vertical direction of the bearing housing. Vibration data is col-
lected every 30 minutes with sampling rate 20 kHz by using Sen-
sory Data Acquisition component on the RPP. A current
transducer is installed to monitor one phase of the current of the
spindle motor as a time stamp. The current signal is also obtained
by the Data Acquisition component and is used to synchronize the
vibration data with different running speeds of the shaft associat-
ing with different machine processes.
All the raw data obtained from the sensors goes through the ter-
minal into the RPP. The raw data will be processed locally on the
RPP and then the health assessment and prognostics results of
the bearing will be published to the Internet through which main-
tenance engineers can access the information at their
workstations.
In order to validate the prognostic results, a magnetic plug is in-
stalled in the oil feedback to accumulate debris, which is used as
evidence for the bearing degradation in the test. At the end of
the failure stage, the debris accumulates to a certain level and it
causes an electrical switch to close to stop the test. In the test,
the bearing finally develops a roller defect.
3.2.2. Feature extraction by fast Fourier transform (FFT)
In this case, the vibrations can be treated as stationary signals as
the machine is rotating in a constant speed with a constant load.
FFT, as a typical frequency domain analysis tool, is chosen from
the Watchdog AgentÒ toolbox as an appropriate tool for feature
extraction.
By using FFT algorithm, the vibration signal is transformed from
time-domain into its equivalent frequency domain representation.
The magnitude spectrum can be subdivided into a specific number
of sub-bands. A sub-band is basically a group of adjacent frequen-
cies. The center frequencies of these sub-bands have already been
pre-defined at the bearing defect frequencies such as Ball Passing
248 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252

Table 2
Time cost for ATC health monitoring.

Dataset Dataset type Vibration (text file) Timing widow (DB file)
description
Dataset Size 750 KB 2 KB
(each)
Offline training # of Training Time for reading per Total time for reading data Time for feature extraction per Total time for feature Time for
dataset dataset dataset extraction training
75 0.5084 s 38.1286 s 0.2973 s 22.2976 s 3.1607 s
Online Testing # of Testing Time for reading per Time for feature extraction per Time for health assessment per Total time for online health assessment
dataset dataset dataset dataset
60 0.5645 s 0.2407 s 0.017 ms 49.332 s
Online # of Prediction Average time for per prediction step Total prediction time
prediction steps
30 2.3151 s 69.4521 s

Fig. 9. Web-based HMI for ATC health monitoring.

Frequency Inner-race (BPFI), Ball Passing Frequency Outer-race

(BPFO), Ball Spin Frequency (BSF) and Foundation Train Frequency
(FTF). The equations for calculating those bearing defect frequen-
cies are described in Tse et al. (2001). The BPFI, BPFO and BSF in
this case are calculated as 131.73, 95.2 and 77.44 Hz, respectively.
Then, the energy in each of these sub-bands centered at BPFI, BPFO
and BSF is computed and passed on to the health assessment algo-
rithms in the next step.

3.2.3. Health assessment by self-organizing maps (SOM)

Fig. 10. System setup for spindle bearing health monitoring and prognostics.
SOM provides a way of representing multidimensional feature
space in a one or two-dimensional space while preserving the
topological properties of the input feature space. SOM is an unsu-
pervised learning algorithm derived from neural network which
can organizes itself according to the nature of the input data.
A task for automatic health assessment is the detection of the
bearing degradation. Typically, only measurement at the normal
operating conditions is available. In rare cases there exists histori-
cal data of defects development in measurements of a complete set
of all possible defects. After a description of the normal machine
behavior is set up, anomalies are expected to show up as signifi-
cant deviations from this description. In the case, SOM can be
trained only with the normal operation data. For each input feature
vector, a BMU can be found in the SOM. The distance between the
input data feature vector and the weight vector of the BMU, which
can be defined as minimum quantization error (MQE) (Qiu & Lee,
2004), actually indicates how far away the input data feature vec-
tor deviates from the normal operation state. Hence, the degrada-
tion trend can be visualized by the trend of the MQE. As the MQE
 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252
increases, the extent of the degradation becomes severer. A thresh-
old can be set as the maximum MQE that can be expected and the
degradation extent can be normalized by converting the MQE into
confident value (CV) ranging from 0 to 1, in which MQE increases
while the CV decreases.
Data of the first 1000 cycles when the bearing is in the normal
condition are used to train the SOM. After training, the whole life
cycle data of the bearing, which develops roller element defect, is
used for testing and the corresponding CVs are calculated. From
the curve shown in Fig. 11, the degradation process of the bearing
can be detected. In the first 1000 cycles, the bearing health is in
good condition, the CVs are near one. From around cycle 1250 to
cycle 1500, the initial defects appear and the CV begins to decrease.
The CV keeps decreasing until it reaches the cycle around 1700,
which means the defects become more serious. After that and till
cycle around 2000, the CV increases because the propagation of
the roller counterbalances the vibration. The CV will decrease shar-
ply after this stage until the bearing fails. When the CV starts to de-
crease and becomes unstable after cycle 1300, the amount of
debris adhered to the magnetic plug installed in the oil feedback
pipe starts to increase. The debris is used as evidence for the bear-
Fig. 11. CV of the degradation process of the bearing with roller defect.
Fig. 12. Prediction results in the feature domain.
249
ing degradation in the test, which validates the health assessment
results. At the end of the failure stage, the debris accumulates to a
certain level and it causes an electrical switch to close in order to
stop the test.
3.2.4. Performance prediction by autoregressive moving average
(ARMA) and Gaussian mixture model (GMM)
The performance prediction is based on the historical feature
space, from which a baseline can be set up for the normal/baseline
behavior. Performance prediction tools can be used to predict the
future feature space based on the historical data. ARMA model
(Pandit & Wu, 1993) can be used to predict the future feature space
in a short term. In this case, the performance in the near future (e.g.
20 cycles ahead) for the bearing is of interest. Therefore, ARMA
model is chosen for modeling and predicting future feature space
in a time series of historical data. Data of faulty condition is not
available in this case. GMM (Lemm, 1999) is a tool to calculate
the confidence value according to the overlap between the pre-
dicted feature space distribution and the baseline feature space
distribution. In another word, faulty data is not necessary for
GMM. Hence, GMM is selected to evaluate the predicted health
condition of the bearing based on the predicted feature space.
Fig. 13. Predicted feature distributions in abnormal condition.
Fig. 14. Predicted confidence value in abnormal condition.
250 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252

In this case, vibration data of the first 1890 cycles is used as the
historical data. Features are extracted from the vibration data using
FFT. Principal component analysis (PCA) is then used to find the
first two principal components which contain more than 90% rep-
resentation information in this case.
Performance prediction is actually based on those two principal
components feature space. ARMA model is used to predict the fu-
ture feature space of the first two components. To determine ade-
quate order for the ARMA model while achieve the smallest error
at the same time; ARMA (2, 1) is the model to start with. Then
the orders of the ARMA model are adjusted and judged by F-crite-
rion which is a hypothesis test that measures the significance of
the improvement in modeling by using two different orders as de-
scribed in Pandit and Wu (1993). This is an iterative step until an
adequate order for the ARMA model is achieved. In this case, the
prediction starts from step 1070 and the number of the prediction
step is 10. As Fig. 12 shows that the two dotted lines are the pre-
dicted results for 10 steps and the two solid lines are the real fea-
tures. The result shows that the ARMA model successfully predicts
the trend of the first two components in the future 20 steps.
A GMM with four centers is used to approximate the distribu-
tion of the normal/baseline feature space.
For each predicted step, Monte Carlo sampling method is uti-
lized to generate 800 sampling points within the predicted confi-
dence intervals. A GMM with 2 centers is used to approximate
the predicted feature distribution and it is shown in Fig. 13. It
shows that the predicted feature distribution rarely overlaps with
the normal feature distribution, hence the confidence values are in
a very low level (near zero). The 10 steps’ confidence values are
shown in Fig. 14. The CV decreases to a low level, which means a
certain abnormal/unacceptable situation is likely to happen. The
time consumed in the online testing is shown in Table 3.
3.2.5. Application user interface
In this case, a real-time web application for remote monitoring
and machine health assessment is also built via using an ActiveX
control embedded in the Internet Explorer browser. Fig. 15a shows
the raw vibration data and frequency spectrum extracted by FFT.
Fig. 15b shows a demonstration of the web application. Spindle
bearing health information can be accessed from the Internet ex-
plorer browser. The curve is the confidence value which indicates
its health condition of the spindle bearing. The circles at the end
of the curve are the predicted confidence values which successfully
predict the trend of the health degradation.
3.3. Reconfigurable capability experiment
The two case studies, which are described in Section 3.1 and 3.2,
are used as examples to test the reconfigurable capability of the
RPP. In the test, the RPP was preset for ATC health monitoring task.
After the physical system setup and connection modification were
finished, the system started. SA created a vacant EA prototype. KA
communicated with the Knowledge base and code library server to
obtain the information for the necessary algorithm components
and the model parameters. Then EA will load the selected algo-
rithm components (Wavelet Packet Analysis, Principal Component

Table 3
Time cost for spindle bearing health monitoring and prognostics.

Dataset Dataset type Vibration (text file)

description
Dataset size 1122 KB
(each)
Offline # of Training Time for reading per Total time for reading data Time for feature extraction per Total time for feature Time for
Training dataset dataset dataset extraction training
1000 0.7725 s 772.5461 s 0.0859 s 85.9672 s 13.2157 s
Online testing # of Testing Time for reading per Time for feature extraction per Time for health assessment per Total time for online health assessment
dataset dataset dataset dataset
2190 0.7688 s 0.7238 s 0.0796 s 3443.118 s
Online # of Prediction Time for per prediction step Total prediction time
prediction steps
10 2.5892 s 25.8925 s

Fig. 15. Web-based HMI for spindle bearing health monitoring and prognostics.
 L. Liao, J. Lee / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 240–252
Table 4
Steps of Task Reconfiguration.
Step 1 Release all the components loaded for task1 and then release the hard ware resources
Step 2 Stop and delete the existing EA
Step 3 Create new EA prototype
Step 4 Load component of FFT for task 2
Step 5 Load component of SOM for task 2
Step 6 Load component of ARMA for task 2
Step 7 Load component of GMM for task 2
Fig. 16. Web-based HMI for task reconfiguration.
Analysis and Logistic Regression) to be ready for the health moni-
toring task for ATC. About 20 minutes later, the physical connec-
tion was changed and SA received a request from the
administrator to change the system function from ATC health mon-
itoring to spindle bearing health monitoring and prognostics. The
steps after the confirmation of the task reconfiguration command
and the time consumed are listed in Table 4.
The test was completed on an Advantech Uno-2160 platform
which has Celeron 400 MHz CPU, 512 MB SDRAM, and PCM-
3178-HG data acquisition board. The operating system is Window
Embedded XP with service pack 1. The algorithm components were
written in Matlab 7.0.4.365 (R14) with Service Pack 2 and they are
converted in to DLL format running with the Matlab Runtime sup-
port. The task reconfiguration execution results are presented in
the human machine interface shown in Fig. 16. In totally 18.80 sec-
onds, the reconfiguration for new application was finished.
4. Conclusion
This paper proposes a reconfigurable prognostics platform
(RPP) which is an integration of both the hardware and software
that can be easily and effectively used to assess and predict the
performance for machine tools. The design of the system archi-
tecture and the implementation of the platform are described
251
Less than 1 ms
4281 ms
3047 ms
2390 ms
3782 ms
2656 ms
2641 ms
in detail in the paper. Two industrial cases validated the effec-
tiveness to apply the RPP to various machine health assessment
and performance prediction applications. The prognostics infor-
mation generated by the RPP can be further integrated in the
enterprise asset management system, which will greatly improve
productivity and asset utilization. The reconfigurable capabilities
of the RPP facilitate rapid deployment and the experiment re-
sults showed the efficiency to reconfigure the RPP for different
tasks.
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