Transformation from Prognostics to Engineering Immune Systems

Reliability of modern engineering systems is becoming exceedingly important for manufacturers to keep a competitive edge in today's global markets. Prognostics and health management (PHM) is an emerging engineering discipline that can help in increasing a system's reliability via predicting faults which allows for preventing unexpected failures and prolonged downtime. In this paper the authors are taking PHM to a new level. Inspired by the biological immune and nervous systems, the authors are introducing the transformation of PHM to engineering immune systems (EIS). EIS are defined in this paper as highly reliable systems that are: capable of surviving disruptions by avoiding it without serious failures and have the ability to resist disturbances while maintaining their stability. In this paper, a background about similar biologically inspired systems is given to compare them with the authors’ concept about EIS, which is focused on mechanical systems and how PHM can evolve from being predictive to being protective.