PFA meaning in Academic & Science ?

Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) refers to methods intended to predict imminent failure of systems or components (software or hardware), and potentially enable mechanisms to avoid or counteract failure issues, or recommend maintenance of systems prior to failure.

For example, computer mechanisms that analyze trends in corrected errors to predict future failures of hardware/memory components and proactively enabling mechanisms to avoid them. Predictive Failure Analysis was originally used as term for a proprietary IBM technology for monitoring the likelihood of hard disk drives to fail, although the term is now used generically for a variety of technologies for judging the imminent failure of CPU's, memory and I/O devices. See also first failure data capture.