Remaining useful life estimation of bearing via temporal convolutional networks enhanced by a gated convolutional unit

Abstract

In the field of prognostics and health management (PHM) for industrial equipment and systems, the estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) constitutes a fundamental task. A reliable and accurate method for estimating the RUL is therefore essential. This paper proposes a dynamic self-adaptive ensemble model, aimed at improving the rolling bearing RUL prediction. This model integrates an adaptive multi-scale feature extractor, a gated convolutional unit (GCU) and temporal convolutional networks (TCN). Through a redesign of the data flow, this model directly incorporates multi-scale comprehensive feature evaluation indicators into the neural network data flow, significantly enhancing the model's feature extraction capabilities. Subsequently, the study extends the traditional TCN by incorporating the GCU module and its gating mechanisms, further strengthening the model's capacity to capture long-term dependencies in sequence tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, our method achieves at least a 10% increase in the prediction accuracy on two public run-to-failure bearing datasets. Beyond the tested datasets, the architecture that directly maps multi-scale evaluation indicators into the structure of neural network data flows also holds potential for broader application across diverse PHM tasks, promising significant improvements in the industrial safety and efficiency.