A Novel Predictive Maintenance Method Based on Deep Adversarial Learning in the Intelligent Manufacturing System

Along with the number and the functional complexity of machines increase in the intelligent manufacturing system, the probability of faults will increase, which may lead to huge economic losses. Traditional passive or regular maintenance methods of solving the faults have the problems of low efficiency and huge resource consumption. Besides, traditional maintenance methods mostly contain single model, so all the prognostics and maintenance tasks of the intelligent manufacturing system can hardly be addressed at the same time. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel predictive maintenance (PDM) method based on the improved deep adversarial learning (LSTM-GAN). The long-short-term memory (LSTM) network can solve the disadvantage of vanishing gradients and the mode collapse from the generative adversarial network (GAN). The method can not only avoid the mode collapse of GAN but also realize the self-detection of abnormal data. Meanwhile, the predictive maintenance model includes two prediction models and a maintenance decision model. The prediction models can predict the state of the machine and the fault of the machine in advance. Then the maintenance decision model will arrange maintenance personnel and offer a plan of maintenance. Finally, a case study about predictive maintenance using LSTM-GAN in the intelligent manufacturing system is presented. The fault prediction accuracy of LTSM-GAN is as high as 99.68%. With the comparison between LSTM-GAN and other traditional methods, LSTM-GAN shows priority both in accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, the proposed PDM can reduce maintenance costs and downtime so that the life of machines in the intelligent manufacturing system will extend.