Remaining Useful Life Prediction for Special Gas Cylinders Based on SSA–PSO–ResNet–LSTM–Attention Framework

Accurate prediction of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of special gas cylinders is critical for industrial safety management. However, the nonlinear, strongly coupled degradation behaviors of these cylinders, combined with non-stationary and high-noise monitoring data, limit the performance of single deep learning models. Traditional hyperparameter tuning and signal processing methods often fail to meet the required prediction accuracy. To address these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid SSA–PSO–ResNet–LSTM–Attention framework for RUL prediction of special gas cylinders. The framework first applies Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) to decompose and reconstruct the 12-dimensional multi-source sensor signals, effectively suppressing noise while extracting core degradation trends. Subsequently, a ResNet–LSTM–Attention collaborative model is constructed, where ResNet ensures stable spatial feature propagation, LSTM captures long- and short-term temporal dependencies, and a multi-head attention mechanism emphasizes critical time steps associated with abrupt degradation. Furthermore, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to globally optimize key hyperparameters, including the number of convolutional kernels, LSTM hidden units, and learning rate, mitigating the subjectivity of manual tuning. Experimental validation is conducted on 1000 real monitoring samples from 100 composite material gas cylinders, with a cylinder ID-based 7:1:2 train–validation–test split and stratified sampling covering four operating conditions. PSO optimizes hyperparameters using the validation set RMSE as the fitness function, and the test set is exclusively used for final performance evaluation. All results are reported as the mean ± standard deviation from grouped 5-fold cross-validation on the cylinder-wise partition. The proposed model achieves a test RMSE of 71.55, MAE of 50.63, and R2 of 0.9584, representing a 34.2% and 30.2% reduction in RMSE and MAE, respectively, compared with the second-best CNN-LSTM model, and significantly outperforming SVR, MLP, and other benchmark models. Ablation studies confirm the positive synergistic effect of each component, with the removal of either the attention mechanism or the ResNet module causing substantial performance degradation. By employing physically calibrated RUL labels and a balanced multi-condition dataset, the proposed framework achieves high predictive accuracy and good potential for industrial application, providing an effective solution for RUL prediction of special gas cylinders and similar high-pressure vessels, with potential applications in intelligent maintenance of complex industrial equipment.