Comparison of four direct classification methods for intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Condition monitoring of rotating machinery is important to promptly detect early faults, identify potential problems, and prevent complete failure. Four direct classification methods were introduced to diagnose the regular condition, inner race defect, outer race defect, and rolling element defect of rolling bearings. These include the K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm (KNN), Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), Particle Swarm Optimization optimized Support Vector Machine (PSO-SVM) and a Rule-Based Method (RBM) based on the MLEM2 algorithm and a new Rule Reasoning Mechanism (RRM). All of them can be run on the Fault Decision Table (FDT) containing numerical variables and output fault categories directly. The diagnosis results were discussed in terms of accuracy, time consumption, intelligibility, and maintainability. Especially, the interactions of the systems and human experts were compared in detail. It was concluded that all the four methods can work satisfactorily on accuracy, in an order of the PSO-SVM ranking the first, followed by the RBM that functioned the friendliest. Moreover, the RBM had the ability of feature reduction by itself, and would be most suitable for real-time applications.     

A deep feature enhanced reinforcement learning method for rolling bearing fault diagnosis

Fault diagnosis of rolling bearing is crucial for safety of large rotating machinery. However, in practical engineering, the fault modes of rolling bearings are usually compound faults and contain a large amount of noise, which increases the difficulty of fault diagnosis. Therefore, a deep feature enhanced reinforcement learning method is proposed for the fault diagnosis of rolling bearing. Firstly, to improve robustness, the neural network is modified by the Elu activation function. Secondly, attention model is used to improve the feature enhanced ability and acquire essential global information. Finally, deep Q network is established to accurately diagnosis the fault modes. Sufficient experiments are conducted on the rolling bearing dataset. Test result shows that the proposed method is superior to other intelligent diagnosis methods.     

Multi-label fault recognition framework using deep reinforcement learning and curriculum learning mechanism

In the actual working site, the equipment often works in different working conditions while the manufacturing system is rather complicated. However, traditional multi-label learning methods need to use the pre-defined label sequence or synchronously predict all labels of the input sample in the fault diagnosis domain. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) combines the perception ability of deep learning and the decision-making ability of reinforcement learning. Moreover, the curriculum learning mechanism follows the learning approach of humans from easy to complex. Consequently, an improved proximal policy optimization (PPO) method, which is a typical algorithm in DRL, is proposed as a novel method on multi-label classification in this paper. The improved PPO method could build a relationship between several predicted labels of input sample because of designing an action history vector, which encodes all history actions selected by the agent at current time step. In two rolling bearing experiments, the diagnostic results demonstrate that the proposed method provides a higher accuracy than traditional multi-label methods on fault recognition under complicated working conditions. Besides, the proposed method could distinguish the multiple labels of input samples following the curriculum mechanism from easy to complex, compared with the same network using the pre-defined label sequence.     

Intelligent fault recognition framework by using deep reinforcement learning with one dimension convolution and improved actor-critic algorithm

The quality of fault recognition part is one of the key factors affecting the efficiency of intelligent manufacturing. Many excellent achievements in deep learning (DL) have been realized recently as methods of fault recognition. However, DL models have inherent shortcomings. In particular, the phenomenon of over-fitting or degradation suggests that such an intelligent algorithm cannot fully use its feature perception ability. Researchers have mainly adapted the network architecture for fault diagnosis, but the above limitations are not taken into account. In this study, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning method that combines the perception of DL with the decision-making ability of reinforcement learning. This method enhances the classification accuracy of the DL module to autonomously learn much more knowledge hidden in raw data. The proposed method based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) also adopts an improved actor-critic algorithm for fault recognition. The important parts in standard actor-critic algorithm, such as environment, neural network, reward, and loss functions, have been fully considered in improved actor-critic algorithm. Additionally, to fully distinguish compound faults under heavy background noise, multi-channel signals are first stacked synchronously and then input into the model in the end-to-end training mode. The diagnostic results on the compound fault of the bearing and tool in the machine tool experimental system show that compared with other methods, the proposed network structure has more accurate results. These findings demonstrate that under the guidance of the improved actor-critic algorithm and processing method for multi-channel data, the proposed method thus has stronger exploration performance.     

Deep learning-based adversarial multi-classifier optimization for cross-domain machinery fault diagnostics

Despite the recent success in data-driven machinery fault diagnosis, cross-domain diagnostic tasks still remain challenging where the supervised training data and unsupervised testing data are collected under different operating conditions. In order to address the domain shift problem, minimizing the marginal domain distribution discrepancy is considered in most of the existing studies. While improvements have been achieved, the class-level alignments between domains are generally neglected, resulting in deteriorations in testing performance. This paper proposes an adversarial multi-classifier optimization method for cross-domain fault diagnosis based on deep learning. Through adversarial training, the overfitting phenomena of different classifiers are exploited to achieve class-level domain adaptation effects, facilitating extraction of domain-invariant features and development of cross-domain classifiers. Experiments on three rotating machinery datasets are carried out for validations, and the results suggest the proposed method is promising for cross-domain fault diagnostic tasks.     

Intelligent fault diagnosis of rolling bearing using hierarchical convolutional network based health state classification

Rolling bearing tips are often the most susceptible to electro-mechanical system failure due to high-speed and complex working conditions, and recent studies on diagnosing bearing health using vibration data have developed an assortment of feature extraction and fault classification methods. Due to the strong non-linear and non-stationary characteristics, an effective and reliable deep learning method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) is investigated in this paper making use of cognitive computing theory, which introduces the advantages of image recognition and visual perception to bearing fault diagnosis by simulating the cognition process of the cerebral cortex. The novel feature representation method for bearing data is first discussed using supervised deep learning with the goal of identifying more robust and salient feature representations to reduce information loss. Next, the deep hierarchical structure is trained in a robust manner that is established using a transmitting rule of greedy training layer by layer. Convolution computation, rectified linear units, and sub-sampling are applied for weight replication and reducing the number of parameters that need to be learned to improve the general feed-forward back propagation training. The CNN model could thus reduce learning computation requirements in the temporal dimension, and an invariance level of working condition fluctuation and ambient noise is provided by identifying the elementary features of bearings. A top classifier followed by a back propagation process is used for fault classification. Contrast experiments and analyses have been undertaken to delineate the effectiveness of the CNN model for fault classification of rolling bearings.     

Intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating machinery using infrared thermal image

This study presents a new intelligent diagnosis system for classification of different machine conditions using data obtained from infrared thermography. In the first stage of this proposed system, two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform is used to decompose the thermal image. However, the data attained from this stage are ordinarily high dimensionality which leads to the reduction of performance. To surmount this problem, feature selection tool based on Mahalanobis distance and relief algorithm is employed in the second stage to select the salient features which can characterize the machine conditions for enhancing the classification accuracy. The data received from the second stage are subsequently utilized to intelligent diagnosis system in which support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis methods are used as classifiers. The results of the proposed system are able to assist in diagnosing of different machine conditions.     

A novel Brownian correlation metric prototypical network for rotating machinery fault diagnosis with few and zero shot learners

Due to the variability of working conditions and the scarcity of fault samples, the existing diagnosis models still have a big gap under the condition of covering more practical application scenarios. Therefore, it is of great significance to study an intelligent diagnosis scheme that takes few samples in the training source domain and zero samples in the test target domain (FST-ZST) into account. A Brownian correlation metric prototypical network (BCMPN) algorithm based on a multi-scale mask preprocessing mechanism is proposed for the above problem. First, this paper constructs a multi-scale mask preprocessing mechanism (MMP) to improve the optimization starting point. Second, the multi-scale feature embedding is realized through the dilation convolution module and the effective light channel attention (ELCA) module. Third, based on the Brownian distance similarity measurement, we learn the feature representation by measuring the difference between the joint feature function and the edge product in the field of diagnosis. Finally, based on the gear data set of the Connecticut university (UConn) and the data collected in the laboratory, it is proved that the BCMPN has better performance in the problem of FST-ZST.     

Real-time scheduling for distributed permutation flowshops with dynamic job arrivals using deep reinforcement learning

Distributed manufacturing plays an important role for large-scale companies to reduce production and transportation costs for globalized orders. However, how to real-timely and properly assign dynamic orders to distributed workshops is a challenging problem. To provide real-time and intelligent decision-making of scheduling for distributed flowshops, we studied the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem (DPFSP) with dynamic job arrivals using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The objective is to minimize the total tardiness cost of all jobs. We provided the training and execution procedures of intelligent scheduling based on DRL for the dynamic DPFSP. In addition, we established a DRL-based scheduling model for distributed flowshops by designing suitable reward function, scheduling actions, and state features. A novel reward function is designed to directly relate to the objective. Various problem-specific dispatching rules are introduced to provide efficient actions for different production states. Furthermore, four efficient DRL algorithms, including deep Q-network (DQN), double DQN (DbDQN), dueling DQN (DlDQN), and advantage actor-critic (A2C), are adapted to train the scheduling agent. The training curves show that the agent learned to generate better solutions effectively and validate that the system design is reasonable. After training, all DRL algorithms outperform traditional meta-heuristics and well-known priority dispatching rules (PDRs) by a large margin in terms of solution quality and computation efficiency. This work shows the effectiveness of DRL for the real-time scheduling of dynamic DPFSP.     

流形结构化半监督扩展字典学习的旋转设备故障诊断

针对有标签数据不足及传统故障诊断模型判别性差的问题,本文提出一种流形结构化半监督扩展字典学习(MS-SSEDL)的故障诊断方法.首先,为改善缺少有标签数据而导致模型的识别性能较差问题,在MS-SSEDL模型中提出无标签数据重构误差项,利用无标签数据学习置信度矩阵,从而学习得到扩展字典以增强字典学习的表示性.然后,为增强MS-SSEDL模型的判别性,通过保存数据的流形结构,学习数据中内在几何信息的稀疏表示,增强信号表示能力及字典判别性.最后,在数字图像、轴承故障及齿轮故障公共数据集的实验表明所提MS-SSEDL方法比其他先进方法的识别性能更优越.     

Deep continual transfer learning with dynamic weight aggregation for fault diagnosis of industrial streaming data under varying working conditions

Catastrophic forgetting of learned knowledges and distribution discrepancy of different data are two key problems within fault diagnosis fields of rotating machinery. However, existing intelligent fault diagnosis methods generally tackle either the catastrophic forgetting problem or the domain adaptation problem. In complex industrial environments, both the catastrophic forgetting problem and the domain adaptation problem will occur simultaneously, which is termed as continual transfer problem. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate a more practical and challenging task where the number of fault categories are constantly increasing with industrial streaming data under varying operation conditions. To address the continual transfer problem, a novel framework named deep continual transfer learning network with dynamic weight aggregation (DCTLN-DWA) is proposed in this study. The DWA module is used to retain the diagnostic knowledge learned from previous phases and learn new knowledge from the new samples. The adversarial training strategy is applied to eliminate the data distribution discrepancy between source and target domains. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is investigated on an automobile transmission dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively handle the industrial streaming data under different working conditions and can be utilized as a promising tool for solving actual industrial problem.     

A subspace learning-based feature fusion and open-set fault diagnosis approach for machinery components

Open-set fault diagnosis is an important but often neglected issue in machinery components, as in practical industrial applications, the failure data are in most cases unavailable or incomplete at the training stage, leading to the failure of most closed-set methods based on fault classifiers. Thus, based on the subspace learning methods, this paper proposes an open-set fault diagnosis approach with self-adaptive ability. First, for feature fusion, without using traditional dimensionality reduction methods, a data visualization method based on t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding is employed for its ability in mining and enhancing the fault feature separability, which is the key in fault recognition. Then, for open-set fault diagnosis, to detect unknown fault classes and recognize known health states in only one model, the kernel null Foley-Sammon transform is applied to build a null space. To reduce the misjudgment rate and increase the detection accuracy, a self-adaptive threshold is automatically set according to the testing data. Moreover, the final recognition results are described as distances, which helps the operators to make maintenance decision. Case studies based on vibration datasets of a plunger pump, a centrifugal pump and a gearbox demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

A new rotating machinery fault diagnosis method based on improved local mean decomposition

A demodulation technique based on improved local mean decomposition (LMD) is investigated in this paper. LMD heavily depends on the local mean and envelope estimate functions in the sifting process. It is well known that the moving average (MA) approach exists in many problems (such as step size selection, inaccurate results and time-consuming). Aiming at the drawbacks of MA in the smoothing process, this paper proposes a new self-adaptive analysis algorithm called optimized LMD (OLMD). In OLMD method, an alternative approach called rational Hermite interpolation is proposed to calculate local mean and envelope estimate functions using the upper and lower envelopes of a signal. Meanwhile, a reasonable bandwidth criterion is introduced to select the optimum product function (OPF) from pre-OPFs derived from rational Hermite interpolation with different shape controlling parameters in each rank. Subsequently, the orthogonality criterion (OC) is taken as the product function (PF) iterative stopping condition. The effectiveness of OLMD method is validated by the numerical simulations and applications to gearbox and roller bearing fault diagnosis. Results demonstrate that OLMD method has better fault identification capacity, which is effective in rotating machinery fault diagnosis.     

基于深度时空Q网络的定向导航自动驾驶运动规划

针对目前基于机器学习的自动驾驶运动规划需要大量样本、没有关联时间信息,以及没有利用全局导航信息等问题,提出一种基于深度时空Q网络的定向导航自动驾驶运动规划算法。首先,为提取自动驾驶的空间图像特征与前后帧的时间信息,基于原始深度Q网络,结合长短期记忆网络,提出一种新的深度时空Q网络;然后,为充分利用自动驾驶的全局导航信息,在提取环境信息的图像中加入指向信号来实现定向导航的目的;最后,基于提出的深度时空Q网络,设计面向自动驾驶运动规划模型的学习策略,实现端到端的运动规划,从输入的序列图像中预测车辆方向盘转角和油门刹车数据。在Carla驾驶模拟器中进行训练和测试的实验结果表明,在四条测试道路中该算法平均偏差均小于0.7 m,且稳定性能优于四种对比算法。该算法具有较好的学习性、稳定性和实时性,能够实现在全局导航路线下的自动驾驶运动规划。     

Exploration in deep reinforcement learning: A survey

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will not find the reward often by acting randomly. In such a scenario, it is challenging for reinforcement learning to learn rewards and actions association. Thus more sophisticated exploration methods need to be devised. This review provides a comprehensive overview of existing exploration approaches, which are categorised based on the key contributions as: reward novel states, reward diverse behaviours, goal-based methods, probabilistic methods, imitation-based methods, safe exploration and random-based methods. Then, unsolved challenges are discussed to provide valuable future research directions. Finally, the approaches of different categories are compared in terms of complexity, computational effort and overall performance.     

Multi-mode data augmentation and fault diagnosis of rotating machinery using modified ACGAN designed with new framework

As one of the representative unsupervised data augmentation methods, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have the potential to solve the problem of insufficient samples in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. However, the existing unsupervised GANs are usually incapable of simultaneously generating multi-mode fault samples and have some shortcomings such as mode collapse and gradient vanishing. To overcome these deficiencies, a supervised model called modified auxiliary classifier GAN (MACGAN) designed with new framework is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a new ACGAN framework is developed by adding an independent classifier to improve the compatibility between the classification and discrimination. Secondly, the Wasserstein distance is introduced in the new loss functions to overcome mode collapse and gradient vanishing. Finally, to achieve stable training, a spectral normalization is used to replace the weight clipping to constrain the weight parameters of discriminator. The proposed method is applied to fault diagnosis of bearing and gear. Compared with the existing GANs, the proposed method can more efficiently generate multi-mode fault samples with higher qualities, which can be used to assist the training of deep learning-based fault diagnosis models with high accuracy and good stability.     

When architecture meets AI: A deep reinforcement learning approach for system of systems design

How to design System of Systems has been widely concerned in recent years, especially in military applications. This problem is also known as SoS architecting, which can be boiled down to two subproblems: selecting a number of systems from a set of candidates and specifying the tasks to be completed for each selected system. Essentially, such a problem can be reduced to a combinatorial optimization problem. Traditional exact solvers such as branch-bound algorithm are not efficient enough to deal with large scale cases. Heuristic algorithms are more scalable, but if input changes, these algorithms have to restart the searching process. Re-searching process may take a long time and interfere with the mission achievement of SoS in highly dynamic scenarios, e.g., in the Mosaic Warfare. In this paper, we combine artificial intelligence with SoS architecting and propose a deep reinforcement learning approach DRL-SoSDP for SoS design. Deep neural networks and actor–critic algorithms are used to find the optimal solution with constraints. Evaluation results show that the proposed approach is superior to heuristic algorithms in both solution quality and computation time, especially in large scale cases. DRL-SoSDP can find great solutions in a near real-time manner, showing great potential for cases that require an instant reply. DRL-SoSDP also shows good generalization ability and can find better results than heuristic algorithms even when the scale of SoS is much larger than that in training data.     

Feature-based classifier ensembles for diagnosing multiple faults in rotating machinery

Recent researches in fault classification have shown the importance of accurately selecting the features that have to be used as inputs to the diagnostic model. In this work, a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is considered for the feature selection phase. Then, two different techniques for using the selected features to develop the fault classification model are compared: a single classifier based on the feature subset with the best classification performance and an ensemble of classifiers working on different feature subsets. The motivation for developing ensembles of classifiers is that they can achieve higher accuracies than single classifiers. An important issue for an ensemble to be effective is the diversity in the predictions of the base classifiers which constitute it, i.e. their capability of erring on different sub-regions of the pattern space. In order to show the benefits of having diverse base classifiers in the ensemble, two different ensembles have been developed: in the first, the base classifiers are constructed on feature subsets found by MOGAs aimed at maximizing the fault classification performance and at minimizing the number of features of the subsets; in the second, diversity among classifiers is added to the MOGA search as the third objective function to maximize. In both cases, a voting technique is used to effectively combine the predictions of the base classifiers to construct the ensemble output. For verification, some numerical experiments are conducted on a case of multiple-fault classification in rotating machinery and the results achieved by the two ensembles are compared with those obtained by a single optimal classifier.     

Elimination of end effects in local mean decomposition using spectral coherence and applications for rotating machinery

Local mean decomposition (LMD) is widely used in signal processing and fault diagnosis of rotating machinery as an adaptive signal processing method. It is developed from the popular empirical mode decomposition (EMD). Both of them have an open problem of end effects, which influences the performance of the signal decomposition and distort the results. Using the cyclostationary property of a vibration signal generated by rotating machinery, a novel signal waveform extension method is proposed to solve this problem. The method mainly includes three steps: waveform segmentation, spectral coherence comparison, and waveform extension. Its main idea is to automatically search the inside segment having similar frequency spectrum to one end of the analyzed signal, and then use its successive segment to extend the waveform, so that the extended signal can maintain temporal continuity in time domain and spectral coherence in frequency domain. A simulated signal is used to illustrate the proposed extension method and the comparison with the popular mirror extension and neural-network-based extension methods demonstrates its better performance on waveform extension. After that, combining the proposed extension method with normal LMD, the improved LMD method is applied to three experimental vibration signals collected from different rotating machines. The results demonstrate that the proposed waveform extension method based on spectral coherence can well extend the vibration signal, accordingly, errors caused by end effects would not distort the signal as well as its decomposition results.     

VIBEX: an expert system for vibration fault diagnosis of rotating machinery using decision tree and decision table

This paper proposes an expert system called VIBEX (VIBration EXpert) to aid plant operators in diagnosing the cause of abnormal vibration for rotating machinery. In order to automatize the diagnosis, a decision table based on the cause-symptom matrix is used as a probabilistic method for diagnosing abnormal vibration. Also a decision tree is used as the acquisition of structured knowledge in the form of concepts is introduced to build a knowledge base which is indispensable for vibration expert systems. The decision tree is a technique used for building knowledge-based systems by the inductive inference from examples and plays a role itself as a vibration diagnostic tool. The proposed system has been successfully implemented on Microsoft Windows environment and is written in Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C++. To validate the system performance, the diagnostic system was tested with some examples using the two diagnostic methods.