Context-aware machine learning for estimating the remaining useful life of bearings under varying speed operating conditions

Abstract

Remaining useful life estimation is a crucial and complicated task in predictive maintenance in order to reduce downtime and avoid catastrophic breakdowns in industrial plants. Thanks to the recent advances in our machine learning era, deep learning models can effectively deal with modeling complex phenomena such as the bearing degradation process, specifically under varying operating conditions. However, obtaining large labeled datasets for training the data-dependent deep learning models is challenging and expensive. To overcome this limitation, a phenomenological model has been used in this study as an effective approach to creating synthetic run-to-failure datasets under varying operating conditions. The suggested methodology is able to adjust synthetic run-to-failure datasets to the different periodic speed profiles, including the speed ranges that pass the resonance frequency of the structure. A Context-aware Domain Adversarial Neural Network is proposed to remove the domain shift between the simulated signals and the real ones as well as enable the deep learning model to understand the varying speed operating conditions and the sequential order of the measurements. The simulated signals are used as the source domain and a limited number of the real signals are used as the unlabeled samples for the domain adaptation task. Context awareness is introduced to the network by integrating contextual information into the architecture of the Domain Adversarial Neural Network, leading to an improvement in the model performance and its generalization ability. A dataset captured in a bearing test rig is adopted to verify the proposed method. Results show that context awareness can result in better performance and also more robust predictions against major speed changes in varying speed scenarios compared to the non-context-aware models.