Independently recurrent neural network for remaining useful life estimation

In the industrial fields, the mechanical equipment will inevitably wear out in the process of operation. With the accumulation of losses, the probability of equipment failure is increasing. Therefore, if the remaining useful life(RUL) of the equipment can be accurately predicted, the equipment can be maintained in time to avoid the downtime caused by equipment failure and greatly improve the production efficiency of enterprises. This paper aims to use independently recurrent neural network(IndRNN) to learn health degradation of turbofan engine and make accurate predictions of its RUL, which not only effectively solves the problem of gradient explosion and vanishing, but also increases the interpretability of neural networks. IndRNN can be used to process longer time series which matches the scene with high frequency sampling sensor in industrial practical applications. The results demonstrate that IndRNN for RUL estimation significantly outperforms traditional approaches, as well as convolutional neural network(CNN) and long short-term memory network(LSTM) for RUL estimation.