ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to define prognostics strictly as the predicting of remaining useful life of a component or system. It focuses on condition-based prognostic systems for a particular monitored unit under test. There has been a significant push toward crafting suitable metrics to evaluate prognostic performance. These metrics address primarily evaluation of algorithmic performance for prognostics applications. The chapter presents a discussion on prognostics metrics. Prior to delineating the methods to assess prognostic performance it may be useful to provide a brief discussion about different types of applications in which predictions are employed. Depending on the length of the prediction horizon in a prognostic application, data processing capabilities are of greater significance from the design and implementation point of view. The time critical nature of prognostic application resulted in metrics for which the performance evolves with time and needs to be tracked.
