An aircraft engine remaining useful life prediction method based on predictive vector angle minimization and feature fusion gate improved transformer model

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is crucial for achieving intelligent and predictive maintenance of aircraft engines. In practical applications, advance prediction values smaller than the true values can prevent serious deferred maintenance accidents. Using asymmetric loss functions directly leads to noticeable accuracy degradation, and existing methods often fail to satisfy accuracy and advance prediction requirements. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel RUL prediction method based on the Prediction Vector Angle (PVA) minimization and Feature Fusion Gate (FFG) improved Transformer network. Specifically, the FFG is proposed to enhance Transformer prediction accuracy by dynamically fusing global and local features. The concept of PVA is first introduced based on the tilting properties of the RUL descent process. The target of the prediction model is cleverly transformed from error minimization to PVA minimization through the cosine similarity loss function. Various experiments on the CMAPSS dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving high accuracy and advanced prediction. Compared to the state-of-the-art method, RMSE is reduced by at least 2.94 % and Score by 7.00 %. Finally, the PVA minimization mechanism significantly improves long short-term memory and convolutional neural network performance. The proposed method is noteworthy for its superiority and applicability.