Prediction of Residual Electrical Life in Railway Relays Based on Convolutional Neural Network Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory

Abstract

In this paper, we address several issues with existing methods for predicting the residual electrical life of railway relays. These issues include the difficulty of single feature prediction in characterizing the degradation process, the neglect of temporal and backward–forward correlations in the degradation process, and low prediction accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel approach that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) to facilitate the life prediction of railway relays and provide an accurate data basis for the maintenance of railway relays. Firstly, we collected voltage and current signals from railway relay electrical life tests and extracted feature parameters that captured the relay’s operating state. Next, we applied Spearman correlation coefficient analysis combined with random forest importance analysis to perform double-feature selection. This process eliminates redundant feature parameters and identifies the optimal feature subset. Finally, we constructed a convolutional neural network bidirectional long short-term memory (CNN BiLSTM) prediction model to accurately predict the remaining electrical life of the railway relay. Through our analysis of the prediction results, we observed that the CNN BiLSTM model achieves an effective prediction accuracy of 96.3%. This accuracy is significantly higher, more stable, and more practical compared to other prediction models such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM), and BiLSTM models. Overall, our proposed CNN BiLSTM model offers higher accuracy, better stability, and greater practicality in predicting the remaining electrical life of railway relays.