Preventing Forklift Front-End Failures: Predicting the Weight Centers of Heavy Objects, Remaining Useful Life Prediction under Abnormal Conditions, and Failure Diagnosis Based on Alarm Rules

Abstract

This paper addresses the critical challenge of preventing front-end failures in forklifts by addressing the center of gravity, accurate prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL), and efficient fault diagnosis through alarm rules. The study’s significance lies in offering a comprehensive approach to enhancing forklift operational reliability. To achieve this goal, acceleration signals from the forklift’s front-end were collected and processed. Time-domain statistical features were extracted from one-second windows, subsequently refined through an exponentially weighted moving average to mitigate noise. Data augmentation techniques, including AWGN and LSTM autoencoders, were employed. Based on the augmented data, random forest and lightGBM models were used to develop classification models for the weight centers of heavy objects carried by a forklift. Additionally, contextual diagnosis was performed by applying exponentially weighted moving averages to the classification probabilities of the machine learning models. The results indicated that the random forest achieved an accuracy of 0.9563, while lightGBM achieved an accuracy of 0.9566. The acceleration data were collected through experiments to predict forklift failure and RUL, particularly due to repeated forklift use when the centers of heavy objects carried by the forklift were skewed to the right. Time-domain statistical features of the acceleration signals were extracted and used as variables by applying a 20 s window. Subsequently, logistic regression and random forest models were employed to classify the failure stages of the forklifts. The F1 scores (macro) obtained were 0.9790 and 0.9220 for logistic regression and random forest, respectively. Moreover, random forest probabilities for each stage were combined and averaged to generate a degradation curve and determine the failure threshold. The coefficient of the exponential function was calculated using the least squares method on the degradation curve, and an RUL prediction model was developed to predict the failure point. Furthermore, the SHAP algorithm was utilized to identify significant features for classifying the stages. Fault diagnosis using alarm rules was conducted by establishing a threshold derived from the significant features within the normal stage.