Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) provides solutions for product health assessment, fault diagnostics and prognostics (the real-time prediction of reliability and remaining useful life).
In today's process of economic globalization, ever increasing market competition pushes the industries to seek for strategies and methods that give them competitive advantages and keep them ahead in the global market place. Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) provides solutions for product health assessment, fault diagnostics and prognostics (the real-time prediction of reliability and remaining useful life). Therefore, PHM has emerged as a key enabler for achieving product reliability/quality, maintainability, testability, safety, and economical affordability, and companies worldwide have been heavily investing in PHM technologies to stay ahead in the global competition.
The City University Centre for Prognostics and System Health Management is dedicated to developing PHM technologies that can benefit the industries by increasing their competitiveness and profitability. The successful implementation of PHM can yield an advance warning of impending failure in a system and thereby help in preventing catastrophic failures and reducing unscheduled maintenance expenses. The outputs of a prognostic assessment of a product are the failure risk, time to failure, remaining useful life, and a prognostic distance within which time specific maintenance and repair actions can be taken to extend the life of the product.
PHM systems are being used in consumer electronics, computers, the aerospace industry, communication, engineering machines, manufacturing, energy and power systems, civil infrastructure, automobile industry, and many others. For example, consumer electronics companies, such as Dell, HP, Cisco, Ericsson, Microsoft, are investing a lot of money in prognostics research so that they can harness the benefits of PHM for reducing warranty costs and cutting product qualification time. The manufacturing industry applies PHM to manufacturing processes and equipment management as a key part of a proactive maintenance. This trend in adopting PHM is ever increasing and will be necessary to stay at the forefront of global market competition. Companies from Asia, Europe, and Australia are all increasingly interested in PHM. Companies in China will recognize the importance of reliability and PHM and understand their applicability to their products to increase their competitive advantage in the market place.
