An Adversarial Learning Approach for Machine Prognostic Health Management

Achieving accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction for prognostic and health management (PHM) depends upon sufficient prior degradation apprehension of critical components within the system. However, such prior knowledge is not always readily available in practice. We alleviate this shortcoming by proposing a novel data-driven framework that is capable of providing accurate RUL prediction without the need for any prior failure threshold knowledge. Correlative and monotonic metrics are utilized to identify critical features throughout the degradation progress. Subsequently, we append one-hot health state indicators to extracted degrading features, which are utilized together as adversarial training data for a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network-based model. Finally, we utilize a fully-connected layer to project the LSTM outputs into the parameters of a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) in conjunction with a categorical distribution, from which the long-term degradation progress is sampled. We verify the performance of the proposed framework using aeroengine health data simulated by Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation (MAPSS), and the results demonstrate that significant performance improvement can be achieved for long-term degradation progress and RUL prediction tasks.