Dependability of wireless sensor networks for industrial prognostics and health management

•State of the art in prognostics and health management.•Limitations of prognostic models.•Dependability of wireless sensor networks.•Challenges of remaining useful life prediction.

Maintenance is an important activity in industry. It is performed either to revive a machine/component or to prevent it from breaking down. Different strategies have evolved through time, bringing maintenance to its current state: condition-based and predictive maintenances. This evolution was due to the increasing demand of reliability in industry. The key process of condition-based and predictive maintenances is prognostics and health management, and it is a tool to predict the remaining useful life of engineering assets. Nowadays, plants are required to avoid shutdowns while offering safety and reliability. Nevertheless, planning a maintenance activity requires accurate information about the system/component health state. Such information is usually gathered by means of independent sensor nodes. In this study, we consider the case where the nodes are interconnected and form a wireless sensor network. As far as we know, no research work has considered such a case of study for prognostics. Regarding the importance of data accuracy, a good prognostics requires reliable sources of information. This is why, in this paper, we will first discuss the dependability of wireless sensor networks, and then present a state of the art in prognostic and health management activities.