Prologue: Predictive Maintenance in Dynamic Systems

This introductory chapter intends to provide a general overview about the motivation and significance of predictive maintenance (PdM) in the current literature, its nature and characteristics, as well as the most essential requirements and challenges in PdM systems (Sect. 1). It outlines the main lines of research investigated during the last 20 years in order to cope with the requirements in industrial environments, by identifying and classifying appropriate research directions resulting in methodologies and components already established for and in predictive maintenance systems with a possible smooth transition to preventive maintenance—“what has been done so far” (Sect. 2). Then, it emphasizes on recently emerging challenges that go beyond state-of-the-art, with a specific focus on dealing with dynamic changes in the system and on establishing fully automatized processes and operations (Sect. 3). This serves as a clear motivation for our book, in which most of the chapters are dealing with data-driven modeling, optimization, and control strategies, which possess the ability to be trainable and adaptable on the fly based on changing system behavior and nonstationary environmental influences. The last part of this chapter (in Sect. 3) outlines a compact summary of the content of the book by providing a paragraph about each of the single contributions.