Parallel Physics-Informed Neural Networks with Bidirectional Balance

Abstract

As an emerging technology in deep learning, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have been widely used to solve various partial differential equations (PDEs) in engineering. However, PDEs based on practical considerations contain multiple physical quantities and complex initial boundary conditions, thus PINNs often returns incorrect results. Here we take heat transfer problem in multilayer fabrics as a typical example. It is coupled by multiple temperature fields with strong correlation, and the values of variables are extremely unbalanced among different dimensions. We clarify the potential difficulties of solving such problems by classic PINNs, and propose a parallel physics-informed neural networks with bidirectional balance. In detail, our parallel solving framework synchronously fits coupled equations through several multilayer perceptron. Moreover, we design two modules to balance forward process of data and back-propagation process of loss gradient. This bidirectional balance not only enables the whole network to converge stably, but also helps to fully learn various physical conditions in PDEs. We provide a series of ablation experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The results show that our approach makes the PINNs unsolvable problem solvable, and achieves excellent solving accuracy.