Sergio Cofre-Martel wins 1st Place for Graduate Student Award

Sergio Cofre-Martel, a Reliability Engineering graduate student, was awarded the 1st Place Graduate Student Winner of the 2020 SER2AD Student Safety Innovation Challenge. Sergio's paper, Uncovering the Underlying Physics of Degrading System Behavior through a Deep Neural Network Framework: The Case of RUL Prognosis, will be featured as a technical presentation under the Safety Engineering, Risk, and Reliability Analysis Track at the 2020 IMECE Conference. A one-page summary of Sergio's paper will also be published in the quarterly SER2AD Newsletter, reaching over 3000 ASME members.

Sergio would like to thank Dr. Mohammad Modarres and Dr. Enrique Lopez-Droguett, who both provided massive feedback and contributions to the paper.

The abstract is below:

Deep learning (DL) has become an essential tool in prognosis and health management (PHM), commonly used as a regression algorithm for the prognosis of a system's behavior. One particular metric of interest is the remaining useful life (RUL) estimated using monitoring sensor data. Most of these deep learning applications treat the algorithms as black-box functions, giving little to no control of the data interpretation. This becomes an issue if the models break the governing laws of physics or other natural sciences when no constraints are imposed. The latest research efforts have focused on applying complex DL models to achieve a low prediction error rather than stuying how the models interpret the behavior of the data and the system itself. In this paper, we propose an open-box approach using a deep neural network framework to explore the physics of degradation through partial differential equations (PDEs). The framework has three stages, and it aims to discover a latent variable and corresponding PDE to represent the health state of the system. Models are trained as a supervised regression and designed to output the RUL as well as a latent variable map that can be used and interpreted as the system's health indicator.

Congratulations to Sergio on your achievement!

Published July 6, 2020