Tackling V&V for Prognostics

We believe our approach to gathering and organizing prognostics V&V information from relevant literature, and then applying it to our specific prognostics application, provides a novel methodological way to approach V&V. Conventional literature surveys have a different purpose – they attempt to distill general themes, offer comparisons and contrasts, etc. Our intention was to provide an aid that allows the application of knowledge gleaned from the literature. It also allows the user to break down the V&V process into smaller segments and to identify potential bottlenecks which then allow focusing the attention. The specific approach we took to organizing the information – into categories of “Barriers” and “Solutions”, where each is accompanied by explanatory text from the original sources, coupled with references to the sources themselves – seems to have worked reasonably well overall. There are aspects that could be improved; the descriptive text recorded proved on occasion to be insufficient to serve as a standalone explanation of the item in question – fairly often we found the need to trace back to the original source and read more of the explanatory context; the reference to the source helped, but still meant a somewhat cumbersome process; we also feel it would have been better to have taken the time to record a reference back from an item (Barrier or Solution) to all the sources where that item, or its equivalent, were discussed; the overall hierarchical organization of these items (see Appendix for the listing of their titles) could probably be improved upon. What we found to be most useful was to use the Barriers as a series of talking points, taking notes as we went along as to our prognostics experts' understanding of whether, and if so how, that Barrier applied to our application. This process both serves as a means to capture the rationale that justifies faith in the prognostics application's approach, and to stimulate (and again capture) thoughts on areas of concern and possible approaches to addressing them.