A Novel Deep Learning-Based Encoder-Decoder Model for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

A novel encoder-decoder model based on deep neural networks is proposed for the prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) in this work. The proposed model consists of an encoder and a decoder. In the encoder, the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (Bi-LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are used to capture the long-term temporal dependencies and important local features from the sequential data, respectively. Besides, single 1*1 convolution filter in the last convolutional layer is used for dimensionality reduction. In the decoder, the fully connected networks are employed to decode the feature information to predict RUL. In addition, the proposed data-driven method can achieve end-to-end prediction, which does not need feature engineering. To evaluate the proposed model, experimental verification is carried out on a commonly used aero-engine C-MAPSS dataset. Compared with other state-of-the-art approaches on the same dataset, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework are demonstrated. For example, the scoring function value of the second subset is reduced by up to 64.99% compared with the best existing result.