Deep Convolutional Neural Network Based Regression Approach for Estimation of Remaining Useful Life

Prognostics technique aims to accurately estimate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a subsystem or a component using sensor data, which has many real world applications. However, many of the existing algorithms are based on linear models, which cannot capture the complex relationship between the sensor data and RUL. Although Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) has been applied to predict RUL, it cannot learn salient features automatically, because of its network structure. A novel deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based regression approach for estimating the RUL is proposed in this paper. Although CNN has been applied on tasks such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition etc, this is the first attempt to adopt CNN for RUL estimation in prognostics. Different from the existing CNN structure for computer vision, the convolution and pooling filters in our approach are applied along the temporal dimension over the multi-channel sensor data to incorporate automated feature learning from raw sensor signals in a systematic way. Through the deep architecture, the learned features are the higher-level abstract representation of low-level raw sensor signals. Furthermore, feature learning and RUL estimation are mutually enhanced by the supervised feedback. We compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms on two publicly available data sets to evaluate the effectiveness of this proposed approach. The encouraging results demonstrate that our proposed deep convolutional neural network based regression approach for RUL estimation is not only more efficient but also more accurate.