Dynamic graph spatial-Temporal dependence information extraction for remaining useful life prediction of rolling bearings

As a powerful tool for learning high-dimensional data representation, graph neural networks (GNN) have been applied to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of rolling bearings. Existing GNN-based RUL prediction methods predominantly rely on constant pre-constructed graphs. However, the degradation of bearings is a dynamic process, and the dependence information between features may change at different moments of degradation. This article introduces a method for RUL prediction based on dynamic graph spatial-Temporal dependence information extraction. The raw signal is segmented into multiple periods, and multiple features of each period data are extracted. Then, the correlation coefficient analysis is conducted, and the feature connection graph of each period is constructed based on different analytical results, thereby dynamically mapping the degradation process. The graph data is fed into graph convolutional networks (GCN) to extract spatial dependence between the graph node features in different periods. To make up for the shortcomings of GCN in temporal dependence extraction, the TimesNet module is introduced. TimesNet considers the two-dimensional changes of time series data and can extract the temporal dependence of graph data within and between different time cycles. Experimental results based on the PHM2012 dataset show that the average RUL prediction error of the proposed method is 17.4%, outperforming other comparative methods. © 2024-IOS Press. All rights reserved.