A Deep Learning Based Data Fusion Method for Degradation Modeling and Prognostics

Degradation modeling is a critical and challenging problem as it serves as the basis for system prognostics and evolution mechanism analysis. In practice, multiple sensors are used to monitor the status of a system. Thus, multisensor data fusion techniques have been proposed to capture comprehensive information for prognostic modeling and analysis, which aims at developing a composite health index (HI) through the fusion of multiple sensor signals. In the literature, most existing methods use a linear data-fusion model for integration of multisensor data to construct the HI, which is insufficient to model nonlinear relations between sensing signals and HI in a complicated system. This article proposes a novel data fusion method based on deep learning for HI construction for prognostic analysis. A pair of adversarial networks is proposed to enable the training procedure of neural networks. To guarantee the stability of the algorithm, we propose a root mean square propagation (i.e., RMSprop)-based sampling algorithm to estimate model parameters. A set of simulation studies and a case study on a set of degradation signals of aircraft engines are conducted. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has a significant improvement on remaining useful life prediction compared to existing data fusion methods.