The PHM Society sponsors a data challenge annually, open to anyone. In addition to bragging rights, there is a cash prize for the winners in both the student and professional categories. However, the most exciting element of the challenge is the algorithms of the winning teams are published in detail in ijPHM, advancing the field of PHM as an engineering discipline. Moreover, the data set from each competition becomes a benchmark for future researchers to compare performance of their algorithms.

This year the challenge focused on using accelerometer data and information about bearing geometry in a generic gearbox to identify and quantify faults. Participants were scored on their ability to correctly identify the type, location, and magnitude of damage. The Society is quite grateful for the extraordinary effort of Eric Bechhoefer at Goodrich to generate the outstanding real-world data set used for this competition.

The Professional (and overall) winner this year was Fangji Wu of the Research Institute of Diagnostics and Cybernetics, Xi’an Jiaotong University (Fangji Wu is currently a visiting scholar at University of Cincinnati). Second place overall, and Student winners are Hassan Al Atat and David Siegel of University of Cincinnati. Congratulations to both teams!

There are two special sessions at the 2009 conference where the winning teams and two close runner-ups will present their algorithms, Wednesday 1:30pm – 3pm and 3:30pm – 5pm in the Sorrento/San Marino rooms.