Recently, a team from the School of Advanced Manufacturing at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) secured the global championship at the 2025 Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) Data Challenge.
The winning team, SAM-IPA-1, was guided by Associate Professor Jianshe Feng and comprised students across undergraduate, master's and doctoral levels: Peng Gao, Fanyu Qi, Yizhang Zhu, Jianyu Zhang and Wenfei Li. Employing cutting-edge algorithms and deep technical expertise, the team outperformed leading academic groups and corporate entrants worldwide, underscoring SYSU's strengths in frontier research and New Engineering talent cultivation.
Championship Award Certificate for the 2025 PHM Data Challenge
Launched in 2008, the PHM Data Challenge is widely regarded as a premier forum for advances in predictive maintenance and intelligent manufacturing.
This year, the competition targeted the critical bottleneck of "small sample, complex structure" data. Entrants were tasked with delivering robust, high-precision Remaining Useful Life (RUL) predictions for aero-engines amidst intricate spatiotemporal complexities. The contest drew entries from top institutions including Georgia Tech, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Harbin Institute of Technology, among others.
To overcome data scarcity and multi-task complexity, SAM-IPA-1 developed an innovative two-stage framework. In the first stage, the team converted irregular, multi-dimensional streams into standardized status indicators, creating a stable foundation for modeling. In the second stage, they designed a collaborative learning architecture with attention mechanisms that enables cross-spatiotemporal transfer of physical degradation patterns. This approach delivered superior prediction accuracy and strong generalization even with severely limited samples, securing a decisive victory over the competition.
Undergraduate team member Wenfei Li (Class of 2024) presented the winning solution at the PHM Society Annual Conference in Seattle，successfully defending the work during on-site presentations and poster sessions, while engaging in in-depth technical exchanges with international experts. Li's presentation validated the team's methodology and highlighted the professional caliber and global perspective of SYSU students.
Wenfei Li with Conference Chairman Dave Larsen
Beyond the trophy, the triumph demonstrates SYSU's capability to integrate industrial big data and artificial intelligence into advanced manufacturing research. It affirms the university's commitment to research-driven education and industry-education integration.
Located at the center of the Greater Bay Area's high-end equipment cluster, SYSU continues to align its research with national strategic priorities. By fostering international collaboration and focusing on ultra-precision, intelligent and future manufacturing, the university is accelerating the high-quality development of New Engineering disciplines and contributing to technological innovation in advanced manufacturing.
Source: School of Advanced Manufacturing
