Introduction to PHM

Prognostics and systems health management (PHM) is a multifaceted discipline for the assessment of product degradation and reliability. This chapter provides a basic understanding of prognostics and health monitoring of products and the techniques being developed to enable prognostics for electronic products. PHM consists of sensing, anomaly detection, diagnostics, prognostics, and decision support. To enable PHM, the physics‐of‐failure (PoF)‐, canary‐, data‐driven‐, and fusion‐based approaches have been studied. The chapter explains each of these approaches. It then presents various applications using these approaches and discusses how to implement PHM in a system of systems. The chapter further introduces the opportunities of Internet of Things (IoT)‐based PHM for industrial applications. The key conclusion is that IoT‐based PHM is expected to have considerable influence on the implementation of reliability assessment, prediction and risk mitigation, and create new business opportunities.