Deep Ensemble Capsule Network for Intelligent Compound Fault Diagnosis Using Multisensory Data

With the manufacturing industry stepping into the emerging new era of big data and intelligence, the amount of data collected from perception and monitoring systems with multiple smart sensors has increased tremendously. Such huge amount of multisensory data may not only power many aspects of fault diagnosis, but also bring great opportunities and challenges in modern manufacturing industry. In addition, with respect to intelligent fault diagnosis for machinery, few researches have been focused on the compound fault diagnosis under big-data circumstance. Therefore, a novel, intelligent, compound, fault decoupling method based on deep capsule network (CN) and ensemble learning is developed for compound fault decoupling and diagnosis using multisensory data. First, a decoupling CN (DCN) is constructed as the basic model. Second, taking the full advantage of multisensory data, the DCN model can be pretrained with multiple sensor data, which can obtain various pretrained DCN models. Finally, combining with ensemble learning skill, the pretrained DCN models are integrated by a combination strategy to obtain the deep ensemble CN (DECN) model for intelligent compound fault decoupling and diagnosis. The performance of the DECN model is validated on an automobile transmission (AT) data set with two compound faults, and the experimental results illustrate that the DECN model obtains higher diagnosis accuracy and decouples the compound fault correctly.