Machine cross-domain remaining useful life prediction via contrastive adversarial variational recurrent method

The performance degradation process of the machine is non-stationary which varies with the operating environment and is reflected as a temporal shift phenomenon. Models or methods that assume the test and training sets have the same distribution will no longer be suitable for solving problems where domain shifts exist. This brings new challenges for accurately evaluating the machine’s remaining useful life (RUL). This paper studies a contrastive adversarial variational recurrent method for machine RUL prediction under different service conditions. In this new approach, the variational recurrent networks are developed to extract distribution features and latent spaces of raw data, meanwhile, the adversarial strategies are applied to enable the learning of domain-invariant features to make the model achieve cross-domain task processing. To supervise the learning process of the model to learn more mutual information between the extracted features and the raw input data, a contrastive loss is also introduced in the proposed method. Sufficient experiments were conducted to verify the feasibility and superiority of the suggested approach, including 12 sets of cross-scenario tests on the turbofan engine dataset C-MAPSS from NASA. Experimental findings confirm that the proposed method performs satisfactorily and competitively even compared to current state-of-the-art works.