A Dual-Dimension Convolutional-Attention Module for Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Aeroengines

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of aeroengines not only enhances aviation safety and operational efficiency but also significantly lowers operational costs, offering substantial economic and social benefits to the aviation industry. Aiming at RUL prediction, this paper proposes a novel dual-dimension convolutional-attention (DDCA) mechanism. DDCA consists of two branches: one includes channel attention and spatial attention mechanisms, while the other applies these mechanisms to the inverted dimensions. Pooling and feature-wise pooling operations are employed to extract features from different dimensions of the input data. These branches operate in parallel to capture more complex temporal and spatial feature correlations in multivariate time series data. Subsequently, an end-to-end DDCA-TCN network is constructed by integrating DDCA with a temporal convolutional network (TCN) for RUL prediction. The proposed prediction model is evaluated using the C-MAPSS dataset and compared to several state-of-the-art RUL prediction models. The results show that the RMSE and SCORE metrics of DDCA-TCN decreased by at least 12.8% and 4.6%, respectively, compared to other models on the FD002 subset, and by at least 10.6% and 18.4%, respectively, on the FD004 subset, which demonstrates that the DDCA-TCN model exhibits excellent performance in RUL prediction, particularly under multiple operating conditions.