Functional Prognostic Architecture for the Maintenance of Complex Systems

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of the maintenance of a complex system of heterogeneous components. With the decreasing costs of sensors, it now becomes possible to really benefit of on-line adaptive prognostic methods in order to support the optimization of the maintenance actions and scheduling. In this paper, we propose a generic health monitoring architecture that encompasses the available prognostic methods and provides a common support for the maintenance decision on a complex system. The output of this architecture takes into account the composed nature of the system by not only providing component prognoses but also function prognosis. In order to provide a prognosis for the whole system, component prognoses are combined by taking into account functional dependencies in the system.