Residual life of technical systems; diagnosis, prediction and life extension

The paper presents and discusses research related to residual life of non-repairable and repairable technical systems. Diagnosis of systems and extension of residual life of technical systems are also presented and discussed.This paper concludes that research published desribing determination and extension of residual life as well as methods for diagnosis of non-repairable and repairable technical systems, is somewhat limited. Many papers have a rather pragmatic approach. The authors only describe special cases from their own plant and do not provide any explanation of a more academical nature. The other papers are mainly describing very specific applications of statistical models, leaving the more general case out of consideration. One of the main results of this paper is to point out these facts, and thereby identify the need for future research in this area.