Computational Reproducibility Within Prognostics and Health Management

Abstract

Scientific research frequently involves the use of computational tools and methods. Providing thorough documentation, open-source code, and data -- the creation of reproducible computational research -- helps others understand a researcher's work. Here, we explore computational reproducibility, broadly, and from within the field of prognostics and health management (PHM). The adoption of reproducible computational research practices remains low across scientific disciplines and within PHM. Our text mining of more than 300 articles, from publications engaged in PHM research, showed that fewer than 1% of researchers made their code and data available to others. Although challenges remain, there are also clear opportunities, and benefits, for engaging in reproducible computational research. Highlighting an opportunity, we introduce an open-source software tool, called PyPHM, to assist PHM researchers in accessing and preprocessing common industrial datasets.