Remaining useful life prediction via a variational autoencoder and a time‐window‐based sequence neural network

The prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) has attracted much attention, and it is also a key section for predictive maintenance. In this study, a novel hybrid deep learning framework is proposed for RUL prediction, where a variational autoencoder (VAE) and time‐window‐based sequence neural network (twSNN) are integrated. Among it, VAE is used to extract the hidden and low‐dimensional features from the raw sensor data, and a loss function is designed to extract useful data features; by using a sliding time window, twSNN can predict RUL dynamically; meanwhile, it can simplify the network architecture in the time dimension. Furthermore, to achieve higher performance on various failure conditions, long short‐term memory (LSTM) cell and convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) cell are designed for twSNN respectively. A case study is completed with a dataset of aircraft turbine engines. It is found that the proposed frameworks with LSTM cell and ConvLSTM cell have better performance on both single failure mode and multiple failure modes. The results also show that the prediction accuracy is averagely improved by 6.65% for single failure mode and 15.05% for multiple failure modes respectively.