A review on reasoning techniques implementing integrated health management

Integrated Health Management (IHM) technology is the emerging paradigm in system supervision and maintenance area, and it is the key to improving platform reliability, security and availability, reducing catastrophic failures and reducing operational and logistical cost. Mainly through as early as possible reporting incipient faults, predicting the remaining useful life of fault components, identifying diagnosis across subsystems accurately and making maintenance decision advisably, IHM system can achieve the goals mentioned above. Those functions, which can be formulated as inference problems, are important aspects of the IHM program. Therefore, it is very important to research the reasoning techniques to promote the IHM technology improvement. A review about reasoning techniques implementing IHM is conducted with the emphasis placed on the layered architecture (supporting both distributed and hierarchical reasoning, information fusion as well as interoperability and interchangeability of reasoning algorithms) and reasoning approaches for diagnosis, prognostics and maintenance decision-making, and the future challenges concerned with reasoning techniques are also presented.