PHM project transitions - Managing the risks

The state of the art in Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) tends to be advanced within the arena of relatively small research projects with limited scope. Studying the physics of failure mechanisms for a transmission gear, for example, is best conducted within a small team lab environment, and research results captured in the form of a report. It is then left largely up to the members of complex organizations on large development teams to select from a myriad of studies, harvest the useful results, and integrate them in some way on a large system, such as an aircraft. Collecting the results of these studies and proposing their integration on a product development program poses a level of technical, budget, and schedule risk that is often not acceptable in the risk averse environment of government funded development programs or private capital investment. This paper proposes patterns for managing the risks associated with applying PHM research results to product development of large, complex systems. The example used herein is an aircraft, but the patterns can be applied to other types of systems.