Learning Informative Health Indicators Through Unsupervised Contrastive Learning

Abstract

Monitoring the health of complex industrial assets is crucial for safe and efficient operations. Health indicators that provide quantitative real-time insights into the health status of industrial assets over time serve as valuable tools for, e.g., fault detection or prognostics. This article proposes a novel, versatile, and unsupervised approach to learn health indicators using contrastive learning, where the operational time serves as a proxy for degradation. To highlight its versatility, the approach is evaluated on two tasks and case studies with different characteristics: wear assessment of milling machines and fault detection of railway wheels. Our results show that the proposed methodology effectively learns a health indicator that follows the wear of milling machines (0.97 correlation on average) and is suitable for fault detection in railway wheels ($\mathbf {88.7\%}$ balanced accuracy). The conducted experiments demonstrate the versatility of the approach for various systems and health conditions.