Prognostics and Health Management of Industrial Equipment

Abstract

Prognostics and health management (PHM) is a field of research and application which aims at making use of past, present, and future information on the environmental, operational, and usage conditions of an equipment in order to detect its degradation, diagnose its faults, and predict and proactively manage its failures. This chapter reviews the state of knowledge on the methods for PHM, placing these in context with the different information and data which may be available for performing the task and identifying the current challenges and open issues which must be addressed for achieving reliable deployment in practice. The focus is predominantly on the prognostic part of PHM, which addresses the prediction of equipment failure occurrence and associated residual useful life (RUL).