Deep Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks Ensemble for Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Aircraft Engine

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of aircraft engine (AE) is of great importance to improve its reliability and availability, and reduce its maintenance costs. This article proposes a novel deep bidirectional recurrent neural networks (DBRNNs) ensemble method for the RUL prediction of the AEs. In this method, several kinds of DBRNNs with different neuron structures are built to extract hidden features from sensory data. A new customized loss function is designed to evaluate the performance of the DBRNNs, and a series of the RUL values is obtained. Then, these RUL values are reencapsulated into a predicted RUL domain. By updating the weights of elements in the domain, multiple regression decision tree (RDT) models are trained iteratively. These models integrate the predicted results of different DBRNNs to realize the final RUL prognostics with high accuracy. The proposed method is validated by using C-MAPSS datasets from NASA. The experimental results show that the proposed method has achieved more superior performance compared with other existing methods.