Predicting the Remaining Useful Life of an Aircraft Engine Using a Stacked Sparse Autoencoder with Multilayer Self-Learning

Jian Ma,Hua Su,Wan-Lin Zhao,Bin Liu

doi:10.1155/2018/3813029

Abstract

Because they are key components of aircraft, improving the safety, reliability and economy of engines is crucial. To ensure flight safety and reduce the cost of maintenance during aircraft engine operation, a prognostics and health management system that focuses on fault diagnosis, health assessment, and life prediction is introduced to solve the problems. Predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) is the most important information for making decisions about aircraft engine operation and maintenance, and it relies largely on the selection of performance degradation features. The choice of such features is highly significant, but there are some weaknesses in the current algorithm for RUL prediction, notably, the inability to obtain tendencies from the data. Especially with aircraft engines, extracting useful degradation features from multisensor data with complex correlations is a key technical problem that has hindered the implementation of degradation assessment. To solve these problems, deep learning has been proposed in recent years to exploit multiple layers of nonlinear information processing for unsupervised self-learning of features. This paper presents a deep learning approach to predict the RUL of an aircraft engine based on a stacked sparse autoencoder and logistic regression. The stacked sparse autoencoder is used to automatically extract performance degradation features from multiple sensors on the aircraft engine and to fuse multiple features through multilayer self-learning. Logistic regression is used to predict the remaining useful life. However, the hyperparameters of the deep learning, which significantly impact the feature extraction and prediction performance, are determined based on expert experience in most cases. The grid search method is introduced in this paper to optimize the hyperparameters of the proposed aircraft engine RUL prediction model. An application of this method of predicting the RUL of an aircraft engine with a benchmark dataset is employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Highlights

Because they are core components of an aircraft, the failure of engines is often a major cause of major accidents and casualties [1]
This paper presents a deep learning approach to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of an aircraft engine based on a stacked sparse autoencoder and logistic regression
A new data-driven approach to engine prognostics is developed based on deep learning that can capture effective nonlinear features by themselves and reduce manual intervention

Summary

Introduction

Because they are core components of an aircraft, the failure of engines is often a major cause of major accidents and casualties [1]. In the field of aircraft maintenance, traditional maintenance is either purely reactive (fixing or replacing an aircraft engine component after it fails) or blindly proactive (assuming a certain level of performance degradation with no input from the aircraft engine itself and maintaining the aircraft engine on a routine schedule whether maintenance is needed or not). Both scenarios are quite wasteful and inefficient, and neither is conducted in real time [2,3,4,5]. Given the scheduling of maintenance tasks based on fault diagnosis, performance degradation assessment and the predicted remaining useful life of the aircraft equipment and the need to prevent faults in advance, prognostics and health management (PHM) is gradually replacing these two maintenance

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Conclusion