A Transformer-Based Time Series Prediction Model with Contrastive Learning for Nuclear Power System State Monitoring

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is currently the mainstream solution for the condition monitoring and maintenance of industrial systems. In PHM, the system condition is monitored by monitoring the operational status parameters of the system to diagnose equipment faults, predict the remaining useful life, etc. Utilizing sequential operational status parameters to complete prediction and classification tasks is usually modeled as a time series processing task. Therefore, a high-performance time series prediction model is crucial for PHM. This paper focuses on the use of time series prediction models to achieve the prediction of key state parameters of the nuclear power system. However, there are still some challenges when directly applying existing time series prediction models to industrial systems. First, obtaining operational data on the nuclear power system is relatively difficult, resulting in a small amount of training data, which causes many models to face the risk of insufficient training or overfitting. Second, most of the existing time series prediction models are composed of high- and low-frequency decoupling modules, while the operational data of nuclear power systems often have fewer high-frequency components, making it difficult for many existing SOTA models to achieve good results. In order to address these challenges, we have developed a Transformer-based time series prediction model with contrastive learning for monitoring the status of nuclear power systems. We evaluated the new model on three nuclear power simulation datasets and four power transformer datasets. The experimental results show that the new model's performance is superior to baseline models. We also proved the effectiveness of our improvement through ablation experiments.