A hybrid-driven remaining useful life prediction method combining asymmetric dual-channel autoencoder and nonlinear Wiener process

Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction is an essential aspect of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM), facilitating the assessment of mechanical components’ health statuses and their times to failure. Currently, most deep learning-based RUL prediction methods can achieve accurate RUL point estimations. However, due to sample variability and degradation randomness, point estimations may contain uncertainties. To obtain both RUL prediction values and their corresponding uncertainty estimations, this paper proposes a novel hybrid-driven prediction method that effectively combines an Asymmetric Dual-Channel AutoEncoder and the Nonlinear Wiener Process (ADCAE-NWP). To achieve comprehensive feature extraction, two feature extraction channels are parallelly combined in the encoder. Moreover, to reduce the space-time overhead of the model training process, an asymmetric form of the autoencoder is composed by using only the fully connected layer in the decoder. Subsequently, the ADCAE model is trained to construct health indicators in an unsupervised manner. Finally, the RUL Probability Density Functions (PDFs) are calculated using the NWP. RUL predictions containing uncertainty estimations are obtained by calculating expectations over confidence intervals. The proposed model is experimentally validated and compared on two datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves better prediction performance than competing approaches.