In manufacturing, cutting tools gradually wear out during the cutting process and decrease in cutting precision. A cutting tool has to be replaced if its degradation exceeds a certain threshold, which is determined by the required cutting precision. To effectively schedule production and maintenance actions, it is vital to model the wear process of cutting tools and predict their remaining useful life (RUL). However, it is difficult to determine the RUL of cutting tools with cutting precision as a failure criterion, as cutting precision is not directly measurable. This paper proposed a RUL prediction method for a cutting tool, developed based on a degradation model, with the roughness of the cutting surface as a failure criterion. The surface roughness was linked to the wearing process of a cutting tool through a random threshold, and accounts for the impact of the dynamic working environment and variable materials of working pieces. The wear process is modeled using a random-effects inverse Gaussian (IG) process. The degradation rate is assumed to be unit-specific, considering the dynamic wear mechanism and a heterogeneous population. To adaptively update the model parameters for online RUL prediction, an expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm has been developed. The proposed method is illustrated using an example study. The experiments were performed on specimens of 7109 aluminum alloy by milling in the normalized state. The results reveal that the proposed method effectively evaluates the RUL of cutting tools according to the specified surface roughness, therefore improving cutting quality and efficiency.
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