A dynamics simulation-assisted transfer learning method for track condition diagnosis in urban rail transits

Track defects are gradually emerging with the development of urban rail transits. However, there is rare research implemented to diagnose track conditions in real time. Although some intelligent data-driven methods seem to have the potential to achieve the track condition diagnosis, it’s hard to acquire sufficient labeled data in actual applications. This study proposes a dynamics simulation-assisted transfer learning (TL) method for label-scarce track condition diagnosis. Firstly, a dynamics model of axle-box bearings considering the service environment is established. Based on this model, a large amount of axle-box vibration signals corresponding to healthy/defective track conditions is simulated. Wavelet transform is performed for these signals to characterize their time-frequency energy distribution modes in the format of time-frequency maps, which are considered source-domain data. Similarly, the time-frequency maps of the collected signals during vehicle operation are served as the target-domain data. Subsequently, a sub-domain alignment TL network is constructed to map the data from the source and target domain into a deep feature space. In this network, unlabeled target-domain data are classified to obtain their pseudo labels. Finally, Wasserstein distance measure and multiple domain discriminators are employed to achieve label alignment between two domains for each corresponding category. A feature centroid-driven loss function is applied to further reduce the intra-class variations, ultimately realizing accurate knowledge transfer from simulated signals to collected signals. A two-level sliding window algorithm is designed to detect abnormal axle-box vibration signal parts which are then diagnosed through the well-trained network. The proposed method is validated through a transfer diagnosis experiment using simulated signals and collected signals. This study provides a promising solution to diagnose different track conditions, which is of great significance for ensuring running safety in urban rail transits.