Context adapted prognostics and diagnostics

Context adaptation is an important aspect of prognostics and diagnostics as it facilitates the ability to provide relevant information to the consumers of that information. For example, eTechnologies facilitate the communication of data between systems and they assist stakeholders in different parts of an enterprise to make decisions based on the same data. However, decisions may differ, depending on individual stakeholders and specific prognostic and diagnostic processes and techniques, e.g. data fusion or data mining. The correct use of eTechnologies can improve the maintenance of an item or system, thus extending its remaining useful life. The challenge is learning how to make good use of eTechnology and ensure that the right information is provided to the right information consumer, e.g. stakeholders within various processes of an enterprise. Technical solutions in industry are often complex; they are created in heterogeneous environments and the information generated must adapt to different user contexts. Hence, context adaptation can be considered a key requirement for systems operating in heterogeneous environments. This paper considers context to be a template that describes a set of generalised characteristics of a real-world situation; the information in the template differs depending on the situation but the type of information is the same. It defines context adaption as the process of gathering information about the context template, such as structure and information type, evaluating this information and changing the observable behaviour to fit the current context.