Improving milling tool wear prediction through a hybrid NCA-SMA-GRU deep learning model

Milling tool wear, a ubiquitous challenge in industrial automation and manufacturing, leads to diminished equipment utilization, escalating costs, and a decline in product quality. The prediction of tool wear is a complex and challenging task, as it involves numerous variables. This paper introduces a pioneering hybrid approach, the NCA-SMA-GRU model. It involves the hybridization of three major components and is designed to enhance the precision and expedite the process of tool wear prediction. The NCA component is adept at filtering and retaining the most relevant features associated with milling tool wear from the raw signals, and it also improves the model's interpretability. Subsequently, SMA optimizes the GRU network's hyperparameters, including the initial learning rate, hidden layer neurons, network training iterations, and the L2 regularization factor, to identify an optimal combination that bolsters predictive performance. The modeling steps and the development of fitness function are explained in detail. The model's efficacy is rigorously evaluated using data from the 2010 High Speed CNC Machine Tool Health Prediction Contest (PHM 2010), which encompasses wear data from both single and multiple cutters. The performance is compared using metrics such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), R-Squared (R2), and computational time. To assess the ability and characteristics of the proposed approach, other popular hybrid models are constructed for comparative analysis. The results demonstrate that the proposed model addresses the limitations of traditional prediction methods and provides insights into the development of deep learning and optimization algorithms for tool wear prediction.