Accurate prediction of machine RUL plays a crucial role in reducing human casualties and economic losses, which is of significance. The ability to handle spatiotemporal information contributes to improving the prediction performance of machine RUL. However, most existing models for spatiotemporal information processing are not only complex in structure but also lack adaptive feature extraction capabilities. Therefore, a lightweight operator with adaptive spatiotemporal information extraction ability named Involution GRU (Inv-GRU) is proposed for aero-engine RUL prediction. Involution, the adaptive feature extraction operator, is replaced by the information connection in the gated recurrent unit to achieve adaptively spatiotemporal information extraction and reduce the parameters. Thus, Inv-GRU can well extract the degradation information of the aero-engine. Then, for the RUL prediction task, the Inv-GRU-based deep learning (DL) framework is firstly constructed, where features extracted by Inv-GRU and several human-made features are separately processed to generate health indicators (HIs) from multi-raw data of aero-engines. Finally, fully connected layers are adopted to reduce the dimension and regress RUL based on the generated HIs. By applying the Inv-GRU-based DL framework to the Commercial Modular Aero Propulsion System Simulation (C-MAPSS) datasets, successful predictions of aero-engines RUL have been achieved. Quantitative comparative experiments have demonstrated the advantage of the proposed method over other approaches in terms of both RUL prediction accuracy and computational burden.
Keywords: RUL prediction; aero-engine; deep learning; spatiotemporal information.