Abstract: 　As an important technical basis of predictive maintenance,lifetime prognostics has been paid more and more attention in recent years.Real-time reliability evaluation and prediction is an effective solution to lifetime prognostics.This paper summarizes the real-time reliability evaluation and prediction methods for engineering systems,and investigates some applications of these methods.Some open problems in this field are also discussed,and future research directions are pointed out.

Key words:

predictive maintenance, lifetime prognosis, real-time reliability, performance degradation