Prognostics for Condition Based Maintenance of Electrical Control Units Using On-Board Sensors and Machine Learning

Abstract: In this thesis it has been studied how operational and workshop data can be used to improve the handling of field quality (FQ) issues for electronic units. This was done by analysing how failure rates can be predicted, how failure mechanisms can be detected and how data-based lifetime models could be developed. The work has been done on an electronic control unit (ECU) that has been subject to a field quality (FQ) issue, determining thermomechanical stress on the solder joints of the BGAs (Ball Grid Array) on the PCBAs (Printed circuit board assembly) to be the main cause of failure. The project is divided into two parts. Part one, "PCBA" where a laboratory study on the effects of thermomechanical cycling on solder joints for different electrical components of the PCBAs are investigated. The second part, "ECU" is the main part of the project investigating data-driven solutions using operational and workshop history data. The results from part one show that the Weibull distribution commonly used to predict lifetimes of electrical components, work well to describe the laboratory results but also that non parametric methods such as kernel distribution can give good results. In part two when Weibull together with Gamma and Normal distributions were tested on the real ECU (electronic control unit) data, it is shown that none of them describe the data well. However, when random forest is used to develop data-based models most of the ECU lifetimes of a separate test dataset can be correctly predicted within a half a year margin. Further using random survival forest it was possible to produce a model with just 0.06 in (OOB) prediction error. This shows that machine learning methods could potentially be used in the purpose of condition based maintenance for ECUs.