Measurement of aero-engine feature-hierarchy fusion degradation trend based on parameter-adaptive VMD method and improved transformer model

Abstract The accumulation of operational time in aero-engines leads to irreversible mechanical wear and tear, necessitating accurate measurement of the health evolution trend for effective predictive maintenance, thus reducing the risk of accidents and ensuring personnel safety. In this paper, a parameter-adaptive variational mode decomposition (VMD) method and improved transformer model are proposed to forecast the degradation trend of aero-engine feature hierarchy fusion. Firstly, in order to quantitatively evaluate the engine health evolution process, the health state aggregate indicator (HSAI) is innovatively constructed by employing the deep blend auto-encoder and self-organizing map network, which facilitate the feature-hierarchy fusion of multi-source sensory data. Secondly, for the significant characteristics with nonlinearity and stochastic fluctuation of the HSAI sequence, the multiscale frequency features are extracted by the parameter-adaptive VMD method with the improved gray wolf optimizer, which analyzes the inherent degradation law. Finally, considering the problem of parameter sharing in the transformer model, a simplified mixture of experts routing algorithm is introduced to implement the switch transformer model to further measure the future aero-engine health trends. Extensive experiments on the multi-source dataset of aero-engine confirm that the proposed method accomplishes the more superior performance for health evolution measurement compared with other available methods.