Once in the hands of end users, such durable equipment as spacecraft, aircraft, ships, automobiles, computers, etc. are in a state of debugging, working or storage. In either state, availability, reliability and super-efficiency are the ultimate goals, which have been achieved through constant monitoring as well as regular, preventive, routine and corrective maintenance. Although some advanced instruments can visualize certain invisible malfunctioning phenomena into visible ones, deeply hidden troubles cannot be found unless monitoring and testing data are addressed using tools that process the data statistically, analytically and mathematically. Some state-of-theart trouble-shooting and life-predicting techniques and approaches are introduced in this paper. ª 2015 Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of CSAA & BUAA.

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