Autonomous Prescription of Maintenance Requirements

Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) has become the Navy's overriding operating philosophy aimed at reducing life-cycle costs while maintaining operational readiness by decreasing maintenance requirements and operating with reduced manpower. To support theCBM philosophy, the Navy needs to be able to deploy appropriate tools for equipment health assessment, diagnostics, and prognostics. This requires an integrated framework for the development and evaluation of monitoring, diagnostic, and prognosticapproaches against actual or proposed shipboard system designs. Phase I successfully demonstrated the concept for a model-based software framework called the Integrated Design Evaluation Architecture for Condition-Based Maintenance (IDEA-CBM), to pullvarious signal processing, diagnostic, and prognostic approaches together and apply the approaches to a partial model of a shipboard system in order to provide an integrated assessment of the system's health. This approach represents a significant advancein the application of CBM technology. Development and demonstration of a prototype IDEA-CBM system is proposed in Phase II. The prototype system will be applied to a complete shipboard system and deployment capabilities demonstrated with an integratedset of signal processing/diagnostic/prognostic approaches to a target Integrated Condition Assessment System (ICAS) through data interface adapters using an open system architecture. The IDEA/CBM framework will facilitate the integration of monitoring,diagnostic and prognostic capabilities to support CBM in a wide range of systems. The framework could be used by any systems manufacturer or system design or maintenance engineering organization (either commercial or military) to select an optimum set ofcondition assessment tools to match the needs of new or retrofit systems. The resulting CBM practices can reduce maintenance costs, avoid unplanned system outages, and prevent system failures. Potential commercial applications are widespread in the powergeneration, petrochemical, food processing, transportation, mining, aerospace, electronics and building industries.