Prognostics Health Management: Perspectives in engineering systems reliability prognostics

Abstract

The Prognostic Health Management (PHM) has been asserting itself as the most promising methodology to enhance the effective reliability and availability of a product or system during its life-cycle conditions by detecting current and approaching failures, thus, providing mitigation of the system risks with reduced logistics and support costs. However, PHM is at an early stage of development, it also expresses some concerns about possible shortcomings of its methods, tools, metrics and standardization. These factors have been severely restricting the applicability of PHM and its adoption by the industry.This paper presents a comprehensive literature review about the PHM main general weaknesses. Exploring the research opportunities present in some recent publications, are discussed and outlined the general guidelines for finding the answer to these issues.

A Review of Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) Methods and Limitations for Marine Diesel Engines: New Research Directions

“…Despite their advantages, PHM methods have other limitations, especially for marine diesel engines. Marine diesel engine prognostic and health management system limitations currently include the following [3,5,13,19,32]:…”

“…Remaining useful life (RUL) is a concept used in the field of prognostics and health management (PHM) to quantify the expected time until a machine or component will no longer function as expected based on its current condition and operating environment. The RUL is typically defined as the time interval between the current time and the point of functional degradation or failure [3]. There are several approaches to predicting the remaining useful life of a component or system, including [37]:…”

“…On the other hand, most alarm monitoring systems on these engines depend on operator experience and engineers' knowledge, and these experts are not always available to assess the condition and data. In addition, modern vehicles are trending toward intelligent analysis and unmanned systems, which has led to the necessity of installing advanced prognostic and health management (PHM) systems [3,4]. A proper selection of prognostic and health management systems will improve engine performance and efficiency.…”