Dual Aspect Self-Attention based on Transformer for Remaining Useful Life Prediction
This addresses condition-based maintenance for industrial reliability and safety, but is incremental as it builds on existing Transformer architectures for a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of remaining useful life prediction for industrial equipment by proposing a dual-aspect self-attention Transformer method, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on turbofan engine datasets.
Remaining useful life prediction (RUL) is one of the key technologies of condition-based maintenance, which is important to maintain the reliability and safety of industrial equipments. Massive industrial measurement data has effectively improved the performance of the data-driven based RUL prediction method. While deep learning has achieved great success in RUL prediction, existing methods have difficulties in processing long sequences and extracting information from the sensor and time step aspects. In this paper, we propose Dual Aspect Self-attention based on Transformer (DAST), a novel deep RUL prediction method, which is an encoder-decoder structure purely based on self-attention without any RNN/CNN module. DAST consists of two encoders, which work in parallel to simultaneously extract features of different sensors and time steps. Solely based on self-attention, the DAST encoders are more effective in processing long data sequences, and are capable of adaptively learning to focus on more important parts of input. Moreover, the parallel feature extraction design avoids mutual influence of information from two aspects. Experiments on two widely used turbofan engines datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art RUL prediction methods.