Remaining useful life prediction of rolling bearings based on TCN-MSA

Abstract As a pivotal element within the drive system of mechanical equipment, the remaining useful life (RUL) of rolling bearings not only dictates the lifespan of the equipment’s drive system but also the overall machine. An inaccurate prediction of the RUL of rolling bearings could hinder the formulation of maintenance strategies and lead to a chain of failures stemming from bearing malfunction, culminating in potentially catastrophic accidents. This paper designs a novel temporal convolutional network-multi-head self-attention (TCN-MSA) model for predicting the RUL of rolling bearings. This model considers the intricate non-linearity and complexity of mechanical equipment systems. It captures long-term dependencies using the causally inflated convolutional structure within the temporal convolutional network (TCN) and simultaneously extracts features from the frequency domain signal. Subsequently, by employing the multi-head self-attention (MSA) mechanism, the model discerns the significance of different features throughout the degradation process of rolling bearings by analyzing global information. The final prediction for rolling bearings’ RUL has been successfully attained. To underline the excellence of the method presented in this paper, a comparative analysis was performed with existing methods, such as convolutional neural network, gate recurrent unit, and TCN. The results highlight that the model designed in this paper surpasses other existing methods in predicting the RUL of rolling bearings, demonstrating superior prediction accuracy and robust generalization capability.