Integrated Diagnostics and Time to Maintenance Estimation for Complex Engineering Systems

Abstract

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) [1] is a key enabler of Condition Based Maintenance Plus (CBM+) [2]. In essence, it refers to the “Plus” by providing the ability to predict future health status of a system or component, as well as providing the ability to anticipate faults, problems, potential failures, and required maintenance actions. From the perspective of operation and maintenance (O&M) world, the vital knowledge requirements from PHM are indicators of degraded health condition (alarm, warnings, call for inspection, etc.), estimates of time to onset of such indicators, estimate of time to maintenance, and ahead-of-time diagnostics for identification of the root causes (or sources) that will likely cause these maintenance calls. Such knowledge provides lead time to the operators and system maintainers to prepare for inspection and schedule maintenance opportunistically, so as to minimize downtime and optimize maintenance cost.