A Novel Cap-LSTM Model for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

In recent years, the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction has become a hot spot in Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) research. High-accuracy RUL prediction can reduce the probability of accident occurrence and improve the reliability of the mechanical system. This paper proposes a novel two-channel hybrid model for RUL prediction based on a Capsule Neural Network and a Long Short-Term Memory Network (Cap-LSTM). Conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are widely used in RUL prediction. However, the pooling layer of the conventional CNN only extracts the most active part of the multivariate time-series sensor data. Moreover, conventional CNN is not sensitive to the direction and spatial position of features and thus the feature information may not be fully used. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper uses the capsule neural network to directly extract the highly correlated spatial feature information, from the multivariate time-series sensor data, thus avoiding the loss of the spatial position relationship between local features and reducing the complexity of the model. In order to obtain the training and test samples, this paper uses the sliding time window method to preprocess the data. Meanwhile, the piece-wise linear function is used to represent the actual performance degradation of the engine. The NASA C-MAPSS dataset is used to verify the prediction effectiveness of the Cap-LSTM model. The state-of-the-art RUL prediction models are also introduced and compared to the proposed approach, providing results that show the superiority of the presented method.