Prognostics

Therefore, prognosis has the promise to provide critical information to system operators that will enable safer operation and more cost-efficient use. To that end, Department of Defense (DoD), NASA, and industry have been investigating this technology for use in their vehicle health management solutions. Dedicated prognostic algorithms (in conjunction with failure detection and fault isolation algorithms) must be developed that are capable of operating in an autonomous and real-time vehicle health management system software architecture that is possibly distributed in nature.

This envisioned prognostic and health management system will be realized in a vehicle-level reasoner that must have visibility and insight into the results of local diagnostic and prognostic technologies implemented at the LRU and subsystem levels. Accomplishing this effectively requires an integrated suite of prognostic technologies that compute failure effect propagation through diverse subsystems and that can capture interactions that occur in these subsystems.

In this chapter a generic set of selected prognostic algorithm approaches is presented and an overview of the required vehicle-level reasoning architecture needed to integrate the prognostic information across systems is provided.