IEEE RS Italy contribution to Prognostics and System Health Management Conference, PHM 2013, Milano

This year's Prognostics and System Health Management Conference, PHM 2013, took place at Politecnico di Milano, Milan (Italy) on September 8-11. The conference was the 4th edition of the Prognostics and System Health Management Conference series.

Prognostics and health management (PHM) is a field of research and application which aims at making use of past, present and future information on the environmental, operational and usage conditions of an equipment in order to detect its degradation, diagnose its faults, predict and proactively manage its failures. PHM provides solutions for effective condition-based and predictive maintenance strategies which reduce the risk of failure while supporting low maintenance costs. For these reasons, many efforts are being devoted to the development of techniques for health monitoring, fault detection, diagnosis and prognosis with the intent of improving the safety and economic performances of existing and future structures, systems and components.

Close to 250 attendees from universities, research laboratories, industries and consultancy firms, shared four days of intense technical and social activities, creating a stimulating and pleasant atmosphere. The participation covered more than 20 countries, with a large contingent of young students.

On the first day, the 8th of September, a tutorial session has been organized, devoted to the illustration of methods of PHM based on the use of ensembles of models and of the most frequently used PHM tools for asset management ad service innovation business design. IEEE Reliability Society, Italian Chapter has supported the tutorial with five scholarships for PhD students, that have demonstrated outstanding achievements in reliability or related fields. The rigorous application process has led to the selection of Sameer Al-Dahidi, Matteo Corbetta, Yang Hu, Sebastiano Maltese and Ahmed Mosallam as beneficiaries of the scholarships.

In the following days, the programme of the Conference has presented the state of the art and the new trends in prognostics and health management methods along with its various technical applications. To this aim has worked the Technical Programme Committee (TPC) of the Conference when reviewing the 306 abstracts and 276 papers submitted.

The conference programme was enriched by 4 plenary talks given by internationally recognized experts in the PHM field. Furthermore, the programme included 198 papers selected by the 93 reviewers. These papers ranges on a variety of methodological developments dealing with health monitoring, fault detection, diagnostics and prognostics, data-driven, model-based and hybrid PHM methods, uncertainty treatment in PHM, system-level PHM, design and integration of PHM systems, cost analysis of PHM, verification, validation, and maturation of PHM systems, standards for PHM, advanced sensors, data and signal processing, vibration analysis, condition-based and predictive maintenance, maintenance decision support systems, maintenance and human and organizational factors, physics of failure, reliability prediction, simulation and optimization.

Also practical PHM applications in the following industrial areas are presented: Aeronautics, Aerospace Automotive, Chemical and Process Industry, Electronics, Energy, Information Technology and Telecommunications, Manufacturing, Maritime Industry, Nuclear Industry, Oil & Gas, Structural Engineering, Train & Railway Industry.

Overall, we, as Organizers, feel very satisfied with the outcome of the PHM 2013 Conference: we certainly realize that this would have not been possible without the enthusiastic participation of all the authors, the Technical Programme Commette members, the reviewers, the Chairman and the local organizing committee.

Piero Baraldi, The TPC Chairman

Francesco Di Maio, The Local Organizing Committee Chairman

Enrico Zio, The General Conference Chairman