1. A method of intelligent monitoring and maintenance of a system, said method comprising: accessing data relating to functional components of said system; extracting parameter information for said functional components of said system, said step of extracting parameter information including performing inferential processing and trend recognition of said data using previous knowledge about said system, and simulating performance of said system using models of said system and previous knowledge about said system; identifying new information about said system present in said extracted parameter information; and providing said new information to said step of extracting parameter information, to be used as previous knowledge.