2011 Prognostics and System Health Management Conference (PHM-2011 Shenzhen)

In 2009, a subway car in Washington crashed due to a track electronics failure, killing 9 and injuring over 70 people. Numerous similar electronic failures occur on a daily basis in the world today; most do not result in catastrophes and fatalities, but some do. The City University Centre for Prognostics and Health Management is dedicated to developing technology to prevent these failures and promote system reliability.

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is an enabling discipline consisting of technologies and methods to assess the reliability of a product in its actual life cycle conditions to determine the advent of failure and mitigate system risk. It focuses on predicting the future condition of a component and/or system of components. The science and technology of prognostics is based on the analysis of failure modes, detection of early signs of wear and aging in complex systems and components, and correlation of these signs with an aging profile (or model). Potential uses for prognostics include estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) and condition-based maintenance (CBM).

Technical approaches to prognostics can be categorized broadly into data-driven approaches, model-based approaches, and hybrid or fusion approaches. Many leading companies in the world have been applying PHM from product design to supply chain management in the last few years and have already achieved a fruitful Return-on-Investment (ROI).