A multi-constrained domain adaptation network for remaining useful life prediction of bearings

Abstract

The prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings could reduce maintenance costs and prevent serious consequences. Due to the variable working conditions of bearings, domain adaptation methods for cross-domain RUL prediction have received extensive attention. However, existing research often focuses solely on aligning marginal distributions while overlooking the alignment of conditional distributions and fails to retain domain-specific information during the alignment process. To address these issues, we propose a multi-constrained domain adaptation (MCDA) method for cross-domain RUL prediction. MCDA method is based on an adversarial domain adaptation architecture, where the improved domain discriminator aligns the data features of different degradation stages separately to achieve the alignment of marginal distribution and simultaneously aligns the conditional distribution. The state discrimination module is introduced to align the marginal and conditional distributions while retaining the target domain-specific information. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted RUL prediction tasks for bearings in various cross-domain scenarios using both publicly and self-built datasets. The experimental results showed that the MCDA method could better handle cross-domain RUL prediction tasks compared to existing methods.