Determining how to do prognostics, and then determining what to do with it

Understanding how to do prognostics is rapidly evolving, but an area of study that is in its infancy is the development of doctrine regarding what to do with prognostic information. The US Army's Logistics Integration Agency has initiated a program to accelerate development and fielding of the hardware, information systems and business processes needed to seamlessly generate, transmit and use real-time, platform-based readiness data. This program is investigating how future logistics support concepts need to be adapted to fully exploit such data. This paper describes an approach that has been adopted by this program to facilitate the development of proactive business practices and logistics system architectures.