Dedicated hierarchy of neural networks applied to bearings degradation assessment

Condition monitoring schemes, able to deal with different sources of fault are, nowadays, required by the industrial sector to improve their manufacturing control systems. Pattern recognition approaches, allow the identification of multiple system's scenarios by means the relations between numerical features. The numerical features are calculated from acquired physical magnitudes, in order to characterize its behavior. However, only a reduced set of numerical features are used in order to avoid computational performance limitations of the artificial intelligence techniques. In this sense, feature reduction techniques are applied. Classical approaches analyze the features significance from a global data discrimination point of view. This paper, however, proposes a novel and reliable methodology to exploit the information contained in the original features set, by means a dedicated hierarchy of neural networks.