Prognosis is used to improve system availability. This is achieved by minimizing system downtime with the help of mechanisms that senses the degradation in the system health to predict the ‘time-to-failure’ of the system. Degradation in the system’s health is measured by sensing the early signs of aging and wear and tear of the system components. This requires knowledge of all the failure modes of the system along with patterns of behavioral changes in the individual components of the system while it continues to age.
Prognosis methods and mechanisms are still evolving. So, no comprehensive guidelines or framework standards exist as of today that can provide reliable and standardized prognosis solutions to the end user customers. The intent of devising such a framework and guidelines is to improve and standardize the implementation of prognosis solutions so that; it will be more effective to all stakeholders from the perspective of safety, cost and convenience.
At present, there is a lot of variation in the implementation of a prognostic mechanism, although having well developed methods for the same. This is due to the lack of availability of a common framework that guides the design of the prognostic mechanism for a product. The framework standard proposed in this paper can facilitate the development of the prognosis methods that are more stable, accurate and reliable, in terms of providing information about the health of the system at the right time making it more useful from the perspective of maintenance. The framework standard provides guidance throughout system life cycle, i.e. right from the development till maintenance phase.