Using Value Assessment to Drive PHM System Development in Early Design

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) systems have been shown to provide many benefits to the reliability, performance, and life of engineered systems. However, because of trade-offs between up-front design and implementation costs, operational performance, and reliability, it may not be obvious in the early design phase whether one PHM system will be more beneficial to another, or whether a PHM system will provide benefit compared to a traditional reliability approach. These trade-offs make the commitment required to pursue PHM features in the early design phase difficult to justify. In this paper, a cost model incorporating trade-offs among design cost, operational performance, and failure risk is used to provide a comprehensive value comparison of health management options to motivate design decision-making. This approach is then demonstrated in a simple case study comparing the use of a PHM system for condition-based maintenance or diagnostic-based recovery with implementing redundancy and increased inspection in the design. Then it is shown how different model inputs and assumptions result in a different system value (and different design choice from the process), illustrating the usefulness of cost modelling to capture design trade-offs. Using this approach, decisions about pursuing PHM can be made early, enabling the benefits to be fully leveraged in the design process to achieve increased operational resilience.