Advances and Challenges in Prognostics and Health Management: Need for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is an emerging engineering discipline, which requires comprehensive knowledge from the area of engineering, statistics, and management. Prognostics is the process of predicting the remaining useful life of a product during its expected future use conditions. Prognostics requires fundamental understanding of product failure mechanisms, often referred to as physics-of-failure, as well as appropriate application of mathematical and statistical algorithms. Health management involves decision making activities to evaluate and mitigate the risks associated with product failure. This paper presents recent advances in PHM along with success stories, and discusses practical challenges associated with the need for interdisciplinary teaching learning.