Machinery Prognostics and High-Dimensional Data Feature Extraction Based on a Transformer Self-Attention Transfer Network

Machinery degradation assessment can offer meaningful prognosis and health management information. Although numerous machine prediction models based on artificial intelligence have emerged in recent years, they still face a series of challenges: (1) Many models continue to rely on manual feature extraction. (2) Deep learning models still struggle with long sequence prediction tasks. (3) Health indicators are inefficient for remaining useful life (RUL) prediction with cross-operational environments when dealing with high-dimensional datasets as inputs. This research proposes a health indicator construction methodology based on a transformer self-attention transfer network (TSTN). This methodology can directly deal with the high-dimensional raw dataset and keep all the information without missing when the signals are taken as the input of the diagnosis and prognosis model. First, we design an encoder with a long-term and short-term self-attention mechanism to capture crucial time-varying information from a high-dimensional dataset. Second, we propose an estimator that can map the embedding from the encoder output to the estimated degradation trends. Then, we present a domain discriminator to extract invariant features from different machine operating conditions. Case studies were carried out using the FEMTO-ST bearing dataset, and the Monte Carlo method was employed for RUL prediction during the degradation process. When compared to other established techniques such as the RNN-based RUL prediction method, convolutional LSTM network, Bi-directional LSTM network with attention mechanism, and the traditional RUL prediction method based on vibration frequency anomaly detection and survival time ratio, our proposed TSTN method demonstrates superior RUL prediction accuracy with a notable SCORE of 0.4017. These results underscore the significant advantages and potential of the TSTN approach over other state-of-the-art techniques.