ATPRINPM: A single-source domain generalization method for the remaining useful life prediction of unknown bearings

Abstract

The remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings is critical to the proper operation of mechanical equipment, maintenance of equipment costs and availability. The existing domain adaptation methods have had great success in RUL prediction. However, when the target bearing data are unavailable or unknown to be involved in model training, the domain adaptation approaches also incapable. To solve the problem, we propose a parallel reversible instance normalization method based on adaptive threshold stage division for remaining useful life prediction of unknown bearings. First, we design an adaptive threshold method to find degradation points to divide the healthy and degradation stages. Then according to time series, we merge the original vibration data and its instance normalized data to increase the data distribution diversity. Finally, we combine instance normalization and parallel reversible normalization of the source bearing data into unified RUL learning framework to solve the uncertainty of counterfactual data and improve RUL prediction performance. The results show that the method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods for RUL prediction of unknown bearings.