Artificial intelligence for prognostics and health management in off-highway vehicles: a systematic review of methods, data challenges, and deployment considerations

Abstract

Off-highway machines, agricultural harvesters, construction excavators, and mining haul trucks operate under extreme load variability, harsh unstructured environments, and constrained sensor instrumentation, creating prognostic conditions fundamentally different from on-road vehicles. While AI-enabled predictive maintenance has matured for passenger vehicles and well-instrumented industrial assets, and off-highway telematics adoption is expanding rapidly, its translation to these software-defined field machines remains insufficiently addressed. This systematic review synthesizes AI-driven prognostic methods, data challenges, and deployment considerations specific to off-highway operation. Following a PRISMA 2020 protocol, the 2014–2025 literature is screened across seven databases, with the 51 studies retained for synthesis additionally quantified by method family, equipment sector, and publication year to expose the relative scarcity of off-highway-specific evidence, and a wide range of methodologies is synthesized, from foundational supervised learning (SVMs, Random Forests) and advanced deep learning (CNNs, LSTMs for RUL prediction) to unsupervised (Autoencoders), ensemble, and transfer-learning techniques. The review contrasts the primary prognostic frameworks—data-driven, physics-based, and hybrid—and the role of knowledge-based expert systems in delivering interpretable alerts. A significant focus is placed on the data pipeline, including sensor selection strategies, data quality, feature engineering, severe class imbalance, and labeling complexity. Implementation hurdles such as operating-condition variability, model validation, the computational constraints of edge devices, and Explainable AI (XAI) are further examined, with a critical analysis of where each method degrades under field variability. Finally, emerging directions are explored, including Digital Twins and Edge Computing, closing with reformulated, off-highway-specific research gaps for real-world deployment.