CycleGAN-based Data Augmentation for Enhanced Remaining Useful Life Prediction Under Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Predictive maintenance is crucial for enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs in Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). One of the key tasks in predictive maintenance is the estimation of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of machinery. In practice, the data for different machines is not always accessible in sufficient quantity or quality, therefore the machine learning models trained on machines in one domain often perform poorly when applied to other domains due to covariate shifts. As a solution, Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to tackle domain shifts by extracting domain-invariant features. However, traditional methods often fail to adequately address the complexity and variability of real-world data. We propose to address this challenge, using a Wasserstein CycleGAN with Gradient Penalty (W-CycleGAN-GP) to learn mappings between domains and generate augmented data in the target domain from data in the source domain. We use our approach to generate realistic augmented data that bridge domain gap coupled with recent work on adversarial-based and correlation alignment-based DA models to improve the performance of RUL prediction models in target domains without having access to labeled data. The experimental results on the C-MAPSS dataset demonstrate a significant improvement in the RUL prediction score and accuracy within the target domain.