A Deep Learning Feature Fusion Based Health Index Construction Method for Prognostics Using Multiobjective Optimization

Degradation modeling and prognostics serve as the basis for system health management. Recently, various sensors provide plentiful monitoring data that can reflect the system status. A multitude of feature fusion techniques based on multisensor data have been proposed to generate a composite health index (HI) for prognostics, which can represent the underlying degradation mechanism. Most existing methods have used linear fusion models and neglected the practical requirements for HI construction, which are insufficient to reveal the nonlinear relations among features and difficult to obtain accurate HIs for complicated systems. This study proposes a novel feature fusion-based HI construction method with deep learning and multiobjective optimization. Multiple degradation features are fused by a deep neutral network (DNN). Several desired properties that the HIs should have for prognostics are adopted to formulate the objective functions of DNN training. To balance the spatial complexity and performance of the fusion model, a multiobjective optimization model is generated for training the DNN. Then, a generalized nonlinear Wiener process model is used to predict the remaining useful life with the resulted HIs. Finally, two cases are analyzed to illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.