An Autoencoder Gated Recurrent Unit for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Abstract

With the development of smart manufacturing, in order to detect abnormal conditions of the equipment, a large number of sensors have been used to record the variables associated with production equipment. This study focuses on the prediction of Remaining Useful Life (RUL). RUL prediction is part of predictive maintenance, which uses the development trend of the machine to predict when the machine will malfunction. High accuracy of RUL prediction not only reduces the consumption of manpower and materials, but also reduces the need for future maintenance. This study focuses on detecting faults as early as possible, before the machine needs to be replaced or repaired, to ensure the reliability of the system. It is difficult to extract meaningful features from sensor data directly. This study proposes a model based on an Autoencoder Gated Recurrent Unit (AE-GRU), in which the Autoencoder (AE) extracts the important features from the raw data and the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) selects the information from the sequences to forecast RUL. To evaluate the performance of the proposed AE-GRU model, an aircraft turbofan engine degradation simulation dataset provided by NASA was used and a comparison made of different recurrent neural networks. The results demonstrate that the AE-GRU is better than other recurrent neural networks, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and GRU.