A Double-Channel Hybrid Deep Neural Network Based on CNN and BiLSTM for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

In recent years, prognostic and health management (PHM) has played an important role in industrial engineering. Efficient remaining useful life (RUL) prediction can ensure the development of maintenance strategies and reduce industrial losses. Recently, data-driven based deep learning RUL prediction methods have attracted more attention. The convolution neural network (CNN) is a kind of deep neural network widely used in RUL prediction. It shows great potential for application in RUL prediction. A CNN is used to extract the features of time-series data according to the spatial feature method. This way of processing features without considering the time dimension will affect the prediction accuracy of the model. On the contrary, the commonly used long short-term memory (LSTM) network considers the timing of the data. However, compared with CNN, it lacks spatial data extraction capabilities. This paper proposes a double-channel hybrid prediction model based on the CNN and a bidirectional LSTM network to avoid those drawbacks. The sliding time window is used for data preprocessing, and an improved piece-wise linear function is used for model validating. The prediction model is evaluated using the C-MAPSS dataset provided by NASA. The predicted results show the proposed prediction model to have a better prediction performance compared with other state-of-the-art models.