Implementing prognostics in ship-borne missiles as an approach to improve their maintenance and logistic efficiency

In addition to the so-called ¿long-term storage, one-time use¿ nature of all missiles, the ship-borne missiles also have their unique maintenance and logistic challenges for their demanding use environment and deployment conditions. Especially, the maintenance and technical support activities of this type of missiles can be largely associated with the failures or the malfunctioning of their vital and highly sophisticated electronic sub-systems, such as missile seekers, and therefore, an efficient maintenance and logistic support system has long been a need particularly for ship-borne missiles. The prognostics have recently emerged as a promising solution to meet this need. In this paper, the maintenance and logistic issues of ship-borne missiles, ship-borne missiles in particular, are summarized. The promise of implementing prognostics in ship-borne missiles, particularly in missile seekers, is discussed. A technical framework of implementing prognostics with different approaches is proposed. The objective of this study is to provide preliminary conclusions leading to an engineering effort for integrating prognostics into ship-borne missile electronics.