Seoul National University Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Byeng Dong Youn’s Laboratory for System Health & Management teamed up with LG Electronics’ Materials/Production Engineering Research Institute and KIMM(Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials)-KRISS(Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science), forming joint teams with each, winning 1^st and 2^nd Prizes at the Data Challenge Competition at PHM Society 2019 Conference. They were invited to present their research at the PHM Society 2019 Conference held in Arizona, USA from September 21^st to 26^th. The technology developed by each team will be each published in relevant journals.

PHM Data Challenge is an annual international competition held by PHM Society, a prominent organization in the field of prognostics and health management of industrial machinery. Around 130 teams from global companies, universities, and research teams including NASA and Google come to participate in the competition, analyzing actual industrial data from sites and predicting the failure modes and time of failure occurrences. Team ‘SeouLG’, winner of 1^st Prize, is an industry-academia team consisting of members from Prof. Youn’s lab and LG Electronics’ Materials/Production Engineering Research Institute. On the other hand, team ‘KoreanAvengers’, winner of 2^nd Prize, is a research-academia team, with members from Prof. Youn’s lab, KIMM (Dept. of System Dynamics), and KRISS (Center for Safety Measurement).

This year’s challenge was to determine the occurrence of a fault and predict the magnitude of the fault in the junction of the industrial system, using guided-wave signals. The challenge required a technology to predict fault in large-scale industrial systems (aircrafts, ships, railroads, bridges, etc.) with a minimal amount of data. The technologies presented by each team incorporated their domain knowledge in mechanical engineering in addition to AI technology, effectively solving the problem. Prof. Youn’s teams have also participated in data challenges hosted by IEEE and other academic organizations, winning a total of 9 prizes in the last 5 years.

“The 4^th Industrial Revolution has led to exponential growth of the amount of industrial data available,” explained Prof. Youn in regards to winning the Challenge. “Analysis and prognosis of industrial data leads to improvements in the availability of industrial machinery, manufacturing quality, industrial safety, and productivity. The expected economic effect is over 50 trillion won every year.” He added: “This industry-research-academia cooperation demonstrates the global competence of Korean PHM technology. Korea can be a leading nation in the 4^th Industrial Revolution.”