A novel deep capsule neural network for remaining useful life estimation

With the availability of cheaper multi-sensor systems, one has access to massive and multi-dimensional sensor data for fault diagnostics and prognostics. However, from a time, engineering and computational perspective, it is often cost prohibitive to manually extract useful features and to label all the data. To address these challenges, deep learning techniques have been used in the recent years. Within these, convolutional neural networks have shown remarkable performance in fault diagnostics and prognostics. However, this model present limitations from a prognostics and health management perspective: to improve its feature extraction generalization capabilities and reduce computation time, ill-based pooling operations are employed, which require sub-sampling of the data, thus loosing potentially valuable information regarding an asset’s degradation process. Capsule neural networks have been recently proposed to address these problems with strong results in computer vision–related classification tasks. This has motivated us to extend capsule neural networks for fault prognostics and, in particular, remaining useful life estimation. The proposed model, architecture and algorithm are tested and compared to other state-of-the art deep learning models on the benchmark Commercial Modular Aero Propulsion System Simulation turbofans data set. The results indicate that the proposed capsule neural networks are a promising approach for remaining useful life prognostics from multi-dimensional sensor data.