The Use of "Canaries" for Adaptive Health Management of Electronic Systems

Reliability concerns in state-of- the-art electronic systems have led researchers and engineers to develop innovative real- time prognostics and adaptive health management methods to assure desired availability. Prognostics techniques described here use a novel concept of canaries, along with data analysis, failure mechanism models and integrated fusion techniques to determine the remaining useful life of a system. A canary is a device that provides data to generate early warning of functional degradation and impending functional failure. Three types of canaries are discussed. Expendable canaries experience accelerated degradation (compared to functional degradation) by design, so that early warning of impending failure can be generated. Sensory canaries provide early warning by observing nonfunctional manifestation of functional degradation. Conjugate-stress canaries provide measurement of life- cycle stress history so that failure models can be used to estimate consumed life and remaining life. This paper focuses on expendable canaries, in particular, and provides three examples to illustrate the underlying design concepts.