Multi-representation transferable attention network for remaining useful life prediction of rolling bearings under multiple working conditions

Abstract

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction improves equipment reliability by avoiding unexpected breakdowns. However, different operating conditions may cause the performance degradation of the prediction model due to the domain-shift problem. Therefore, a novel method based on the multiple representation transferable attention network (MRTAN) is proposed in this paper for RUL prediction under multiple working conditions. In the MRTAN-based method, multiple convolutional modules are first used to learn the degradation features. Next, the multi-representation adaptation module is utilized to further mine the multiple domain-invariant representations. Then, during the training process, the transferable attention module can activate the representation with high transferability dynamically. Finally, the prognostic model is optimized by multiple optimization objectives and the back-propagation algorithm. Besides, multiple cross-domain RUL prediction tasks are employed to validate the effectiveness of the MRTAN-based model. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can provide better prognostic performance and avoid the negative transfer problem.