System performance prognostic: context, issues and requirements

Maintenance plays now a critical role in manufacturing for achieving important cost savings and competitive advantage while preserving product and process conditions. Such a role suggests moving from conventional maintenance practices to predictive strategy. However industrial systems are complex and need to have a global view of the system health and its performance. Indeed a maintenance action has to be done at the right time according to the system performance and the component Remaining Useful Life (RUL) given by a prognostic process. Nevertheless system performance prognostic are lacking in generic methodology and support tools for assessing system performance vs. component degradations. In that way, generic concepts in relation with dysfunctional causality of the system performance are introduced. These concepts are traditionally modelled separately although they interact with each others. Thus this paper aims at giving issues and requirements on models representative of each concept and for information to share between them in order to reach a global system performance prognostic model.