Challenges, Issues, and Lessons Learned Chasing the “ Big P”: Real Predictive Prognostics Part 2

The desire and need for real predictive prognostic capabilities have been around for as long as man has operated complex and expensive machinery. This has been true for both mechanical and electronic systems. There has been a long history of trying to develop and implement various degrees of prognostic and useful life remaining capabilities. Recently, stringent diagnostic, prognostic, and health management (PHM) capability requirements are being placed on new applications, like the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), in order to enable and reap the benefits of new and revolutionary logistic support concepts. While fault detection and fault isolation effectiveness with very low false alarm rates continue to improve on these new applications; prognostics requirements are even more ambitious and present very significant challenges to the system design teams. These prognostic challenges have been aggressively addressed for mechanical systems for some time; but are only recently being fully explored for electronics systems. This second paper in a series continue to explore background, benefit impacts, and architectures; highlight some additional design challenges and issues; discuss prognostic capabilities for electronic systems; review strategies for prognostic capability verification and validation; and draw heavily on other related lessons learned from previous and current prognostic development efforts