The 12th International Conference on Prognostics and System Health Management (PHM 2021) was successfully held recently. The Conference was hosted by ZZULI and co-sponsored by renowned universities and academic associations at home and abroad, such as Beijing Institute of Technology, Carleton University in Canada, Chongqing Technology and Business University, and IEEE Reliability Society, with Prof. Peter Liu from Carleton University as Honorary Chairman, and Prof. Huang Rongjie, Secretary of the Party Committee and President of ZZULI, as Chairman. In addition, more than 200 experts and scholars at home and abroad participated in the online conference.

The head of College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering of ZZULI produced a brief description of ZZULI, and presented the achievements of the College in talent training, scientific research, discipline construction and social services. Prof. Peter Liu introduced the purpose of establishing PHM and the previous conferences. Prof. Du Wenliao gave an account of the general condition of PHM 2021. Prof. Wilson Wang, Chairman of the Research Center for Intelligent Diagnosis and Prognostics of Engineering Systems at Lakehead University in Canada, and Deputy Chief Engineer Chen Yiqiang, researcher in the National Key Laboratory of CEPREI, made a report respectively at the Conference. PHM 2021 featured three online parallel sessions, in which all paper authors communicated with others via oral presentations or posters. In the sessions, scholars shared the up-to-date achievements in scientific research and had fruitful exchanges of views about research hot-spots and frontier topics in the field of prognostics and health management.

Over 11 years’ development, PHM has become one of the grandest events for researchers and industry professionals in the field. PHM 2021 is committed to providing an interdisciplinary platform related to topics of PHM, aiming to promote the exchanges and development of the fields related to PHM. The Conference received a total of 203 abstracts/papers at home and abroad and finally accepted 86 papers through rigorous review. Based on the comments of the paper review committee, seven papers won the Best Paper Award. After being supplemented, some excellent papers would be recommended to the Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering (indexed by SCI) for publishing.

The successful PHM 2021 has broadened the international vision of teachers and students of relevant disciplines in ZZULI, strengthened academic exchanges and cooperation, and extended the prestige and international influence of ZZULI and its discipline of Mechanical Engineering.