A Model Based on CNN-LSTM for the Remaining Life Prediction of Equipment in Aircraft Assembly Pulsation Production Line

Abstract

The aircraft assembly pulsation production line is an advanced and efficient assembly method widely used in aircraft manufacturing. However, equipment malfunctions would occur and can disrupt production takt, affecting the production efficiency. Therefore, accurately predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of equipment is very crucial. To meet the requirements of both prediction accuracy and efficiency for RUL model used in aircraft pulsation production line, this work proposed a model combining convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) for RUL prediction. Optimization was performed for the number of neurons in the proposed model with genetic algorithm (GA) to regulate the prediction accuracy and efficiency. Two public datasets representing typical equipment in the pulsation production line were used to validate the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model outperforms the traditional model with substantial improvements in the fitness function of 19.8%, and 30.2% for the two testing datasets. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of RUL prediction.