December 11, 2008

RIACS Scientist Kai Goebel hosted the Prognostics Industry Day at NASA Ames

The Prognostics Center of Excellence (PCoE) at NASA Ames (prognostics.nasa.gov), under the leadership of USRA IPA Kai Goebel, hosted the Prognostics Industry Day on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008. The goal was for attendees to learn about the scope of prognostics in the engineered systems of today and the future.

Emphasis was on interactive hardware-in-the-loop demonstrations of various experiments where the latest prognostic technology is at work within IVHM and other programs. In addition, it was communicated how NASA's resources can be leveraged to develop system health management programs that is relevant to both attendees' own domains and to NASA's broad research and development directives.

Serdar Uckun (PARC), formerly director of RIACS, gave the keynote speech on "Prognostics and Health Management: the Second Decade" in which he outlined the challenges in prognostics, drew comparisons of conducting prognostics in medicine and engineering and discussed the business impact of prognostics.

75 participants from industry, academia, NASA, and other government organizations attended the event. In particular, a number of elders in the PHM community attended, including those from the Air Force, Army, JSFPO (ret.), academia and industry. Areas where NASA's participation is considered crucial were discussed in a dedicated session. The consensus was that the community is looking for NASA's leadership in PHM in: Setting standards and metrics; Educating the rest of the community on state-of-the-art in prognostics research; Providing objective judgment and technical assessment of different technical approaches and methods; Helping to coordinate systems health related information that is being promoted in different organizations; Providing technical contributions to advance successful remaining life estimates, V&V for PHM/Prognostics, and Design for PHM/Prognostics.

BACKGROUND:

Within the IVHM project, health management techniques are explored for complex subsystems in aeronautics. Specifically, prognostics techniques, considered the Achilles heel of condition based maintenance, are explored as game changers for advanced health management concepts by providing decision makers with advance notice of **when* *an impact on operations can be expected due to component failure. The Industry day was organized to showcase the research conducted at the Prognostics Center of Excellence and increase interaction with the prognostics community beyond NASA Ames PCoE.