A Review of Fault Diagnosis and Intelligent Operations and Maintenance for Agricultural Machinery: Fault Mechanisms, Key Technologies, and Practical Recommendations.

Agricultural machinery operates under variable loads, impacts, dust, and changing soil-crop interactions, allowing faults to propagate through energy, material, information, and control pathways. This qualitative review synthesizes 195 research publications across fault formation, trustworthy diagnosis, prognostics and proactive risk control, maintenance and recovery, and case-based evidence assessment. Empirical findings are reported separately from review-derived recommendations, the authors' conceptual requirements, and mandatory provisions of applicable standards or law. The literature most consistently supports controlled-fault identification, selected single-machine field monitoring, and localized operational compensation. Evidence is weaker for transfer across machines and seasons, calibrated prognostics, safety authorization, post-repair verification, and fleet-scale deployment. On this basis, the review recommends mission profile-specific fault boundaries, traceable diagnostic outputs, explicit uncertainty and abstention, and risk decisions linked to remaining work and resources. It also proposes a diagnostic passport, risk evolution trajectory, repair-effectiveness label, case-evidence matrix, and closed-loop repair workflow as review-level organizing constructs. No included study continuously followed the same machine or fleet through diagnosis, prognosis, authorization, maintenance, acceptance, and feedback; the framework therefore connects evidence-supported stages theoretically rather than claiming end-to-end validation.