A Hybrid Prognostic Approach Based on Deep Learning for the Degradation Prediction of Machinery

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is of great significance for prognostic and health management (PHM) as it can achieve more reliable and effective maintenance strategies. With the advances in the field of deep learning, data-driven methods have provided promising prognostic prediction results. Hence, this research presents a data-driven prognostic approach based on deep learning models for predicting the RUL of mechanical systems effectively. Multiple separable convolution layers, a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layer, and fully-connected layers (FCL) are included in the proposed network, named the SC-BLSTM, to accomplish more accurate prognostic prediction from the raw degradation data acquired by different sensors. The proposed SC-BLSTM approach aims to learn complex and nonlinear features from the input data and capture temporal dependencies from the learned features. The presented approach in this research is tested and verified on the degradation data of turbofan engines (C-MAPSS dataset) from NASA. The result demonstrated that the SC-BLSTM is able to achieve more effective RUL prediction compared with some existing prognostic models

Industrial internet of things platform for predictive maintenance

POCI-01-0247-FEDER-038436Industry 4.0, allied with the growth and democratization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the advent of IoT, is paving the way for the complete digitization and automation of industrial processes. Maintenance is one of these processes, where the introduction of a predictive approach, as opposed to the traditional techniques, is expected to considerably improve the industry maintenance strategies with gains such as reduced downtime, improved equipment effectiveness, lower maintenance costs, increased return on assets, risk mitigation, and, ultimately, profitable growth. With predictive maintenance, dedicated sensors monitor the critical points of assets. The sensor data then feed into machine learning algorithms that can infer the asset health status and inform operators and decision-makers. With this in mind, in this paper, we present TIP4.0, a platform for predictive maintenance based on a modular software solution for edge computing gateways. TIP4.0 is built around Yocto, which makes it readily available and compliant with Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) or proprietary hardware. TIP4.0 was conceived with an industry mindset with communication interfaces that allow it to serve sensor networks in the shop floor and modular software architecture that allows it to be easily adjusted to new deployment scenarios. To showcase its potential, the TIP4.0 platform was validated over COTS hardware, and we considered a public data-set for the simulation of predictive maintenance scenarios. We used a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) architecture, which provided competitive performance over the state-of-the-art approaches, while being approximately four-times and two-times faster than the uncompressed model inference on the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphical Processing Unit, respectively. These results highlight the capabilities of distributed large-scale edge computing over industrial scenarios.publishersversionpublishe

A Transformer-based Framework For Multi-variate Time Series: A Remaining Useful Life Prediction Use Case

In recent times, Large Language Models (LLMs) have captured a global spotlight and revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing. One of the factors attributed to the effectiveness of LLMs is the model architecture used for training, transformers. Transformer models excel at capturing contextual features in sequential data since time series data are sequential, transformer models can be leveraged for more efficient time series data prediction. The field of prognostics is vital to system health management and proper maintenance planning. A reliable estimation of the remaining useful life (RUL) of machines holds the potential for substantial cost savings. This includes avoiding abrupt machine failures, maximizing equipment usage, and serving as a decision support system (DSS). This work proposed an encoder-transformer architecture-based framework for multivariate time series prediction for a prognostics use case. We validated the effectiveness of the proposed framework on all four sets of the C-MAPPS benchmark dataset for the remaining useful life prediction task. To effectively transfer the knowledge and application of transformers from the natural language domain to time series, three model-specific experiments were conducted. Also, to enable the model awareness of the initial stages of the machine life and its degradation path, a novel expanding window method was proposed for the first time in this work, it was compared with the sliding window method, and it led to a large improvement in the performance of the encoder transformer model. Finally, the performance of the proposed encoder-transformer model was evaluated on the test dataset and compared with the results from 13 other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in the literature and it outperformed them all with an average performance increase of 137.65% over the next best model across all the datasets

Deep reinforcement learning for predictive aircraft maintenance using probabilistic Remaining-Useful-Life prognostics

The increasing availability of sensor monitoring data has stimulated the development of Remaining-Useful-Life (RUL) prognostics and maintenance planning models. However, existing studies focus either on RUL prognostics only, or propose maintenance planning based on simple assumptions about degradation trends. We propose a framework to integrate data-driven probabilistic RUL prognostics into predictive maintenance planning. We estimate the distribution of RUL using Convolutional Neural Networks with Monte Carlo dropout. These prognostics are updated over time, as more measurements become available. We further pose the maintenance planning problem as a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) problem where maintenance actions are triggered based on the estimates of the RUL distribution. We illustrate our framework for the maintenance of aircraft turbofan engines. Using our DRL approach, the total maintenance cost is reduced by 29.3% compared to the case when engines are replaced at the mean-estimated-RUL. In addition, 95.6% of unscheduled maintenance is prevented, and the wasted life of the engines is limited to only 12.81 cycles. Overall, we propose a roadmap for predictive maintenance from sensor measurements to data-driven probabilistic RUL prognostics, to maintenance planning

Energy based logic mining analysis with hopfield neural network for recruitment evaluation

An effective recruitment evaluation plays an important role in the success of companies, industries and institutions. In order to obtain insight on the relationship between factors contributing to systematic recruitment, the artificial neural network and logic mining approach can be adopted as a data extraction model. In this work, an energy based k satisfiability reverse analysis incorporating a Hopfield neural network is proposed to extract the relationship between the factors in an electronic (E) recruitment data set. The attributes of E recruitment data set are represented in the form of k satisfiability logical representation. We proposed the logical representation to 2-satisfiability and 3-satisfiability representation, which are regarded as a systematic logical representation. The E recruitment data set is obtained from an insurance agency in Malaysia, with the aim of extracting the relationship of dominant attributes that contribute to positive recruitment among the potential candidates. Thus, our approach is evaluated according to correctness, robustness and accuracy of the induced logic obtained, corresponding to the E recruitment data. According to the experimental simulations with different number of neurons, the findings indicated the effectiveness and robustness of energy based k satisfiability reverse analysis with Hopfield neural network in extracting the dominant attributes toward positive recruitment in the insurance agency in Malaysia

Remaining useful life prediction using multi-scale deep convolutional neural network

Accurate and reliable remaining useful life (RUL) assessment result provides decision-makers valuable information to take suitable maintenance strategy to maximize the equipment usage and avoid costly failure. The conventional RUL prediction methods include model-based and data-driven. However, with the rapid development of modern industries, the physical model is becoming less capable of describing sophisticated systems, and the traditional data-driven methods have limited ability to learn sophisticated features. To overcome these problems, a multi-scale deep convolutional neural network (MS-DCNN) which have powerful feature extraction capability due to its multi-scale structure is proposed in this paper. This network constructs a direct relationship between Condition Monitoring (CM) data and ground-RUL without using any prior information. The MS-DCNN has three multi-scale blocks (MS-BLOCKs), where three different sizes of convolution operations are put on each block in parallel. This structure improves the network's ability to learn complex features by extracting features of different scales. The developed algorithm includes three stages: data pre-processing, model training, and RUL prediction. After the min–max normalization pre-processing, the data is sent to the MS-DCNN network for parameter training directly, and the associated RUL value can be estimated base on the learned representations. Regularization helps to improve prediction accuracy and alleviate the overfitting problem. We evaluate the method on the available modular aero-propulsion system simulation data (C-MAPSS dataset) from NASA. The results show that the proposed method achieves good prognostics performance compared with other network architectures and state-of-the-art methods. RUL prediction result is obtained precisely without increasing the calculation burden

An integrated deep learning-based approach for automobile maintenance prediction with GIS data

Predictive maintenance (PdM) can be beneficial to the industry in terms of lowering maintenance cost and improve productivity. Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is an important task in PdM. The RUL of an automobile can be impacted by various surrounding factors such as weather, traffic and terrain, which can be captured by the geographical information system (GIS). Recently, most researchers have conducted studies of RUL modelling based on sensor data. Owing to the fact that the collection of sensor data is expensive, while maintenance data is relatively easy to obtain. This study aims to establish an automobile RUL prediction model with GIS data through a data-driven approach. In this approach, firstly, due to the data type and sampling rate of the maintenance data and GIS data are different, a data integration scheme was researched. Secondly, the Cox proportional hazard model (Cox PHM) was introduced to construct the health index (HI) for the integrated data. Then, a deep learning structure called M-LSTM (Merged-long-short term memory) network was designed for HI modelling based on the integrated data which contains both sequential data and ordinary numeric data. Finally, the RUL was mapped by predicted HI and the Cox PHM. An experimental study using a sizable real-world fleet maintenance dataset provided by a UK fleet company revealed the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the impact of the GIS factors on the automobiles under investigation

Advanced data-driven methods for prognostics and life extension of assets using condition monitoring and sensor data.

A considerable number of engineering assets are fast reaching and operating beyond their orignal design lives. This is the case across various industrial sectors, including oil and gas, wind energy, nuclear energy, etc. Another interesting evolution is the on-going advancement in cyber-physical systems (CPS), where assets within an industrial plant are now interconnected. Consequently, conventional ways of progressing engineering assets beyond their original design lives would need to change. This is the fundamental research gap that this PhD sets out to address. Due to the complexity of CPS assets, modelling their failure cannot be simplistically or analytically achieved as was the case with older assets. This research is a completely novel attempt at using advanced analytics techniques to address the core aspects of asset life extension (LE). The obvious challenge in a system with several pieces of disparate equipment under condition monitoring is how to identify those that need attention and prioritise them. To address this gap, a technique which combined machine learning algorithms and practices from reliability-centered maintenance was developed, along with the use of a novel health condition index called the potential failure interval factor (PFIF). The PFIF was shown to be a good indicator of asset health states, thus enabling the categorisation of equipment as “healthy”, “good ” or “soon-to-fail”. LE strategies were then devoted to the vulnerable group labelled “good – monitor” and “soon-to-fail”. Furthermore, a class of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms known as Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) were used in predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) for the vulnerable assets. The novelty in this was the implicit modelling of the aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties in the RUL prediction, thus yielding interpretable predictions that were useful for LE decision-making. An advanced analytics approach to LE decision-making was then proposed, with the novelty of implementing LE as an on-going series of activities, similar to operation and maintenance (O&M). LE strategies would therefore be implemented at the system, sub-system or component level, meshing seamlessly with O&M, albeit with the clear goal of extending the useful life of the overall asset. The research findings buttress the need for a paradigm shift, from conventional ways of implementing LE in the form of a project at the end of design life, to a more systematic approach based on advanced analytics.Shafiee, Mahmood (Associate)PhD in Energy and Powe