Requirements Flowdown for Prognostics and Health Management

This estimate is a key for planning and decision making in an operational setting. While technology solutions have made considerable advances, the tie-in into the systems engineering process is lagging behind, which delays fielding of PHM-enabled systems.

The derivation of specifications from high level requirements for algorithm performance to ensure quality predictions is not well developed. From an engineering perspective some key parameters driving the requirements for prognostics performance include: (1) maximum allowable Probability of Failure (PoF) of the prognostic system to bound the risk of losing an asset, (2) tolerable limits on proactive maintenance to minimize missed opportunity of asset usage, (3) lead time to specify the amount of advanced warning needed for actionable decisions, and (4) required confidence to specify when prognosis is sufficiently good to be used.