Enhancing aircraft engine remaining useful life prediction via multiscale deep transfer learning with limited data

Predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of the aircraft engine based on historical data plays a pivotal role in formulating maintenance strategies and mitigating the risk of critical failures. None the less, attaining precise RUL predictions often encounters challenges due to the scarcity of historical condition monitoring data. This paper introduces a multiscale deep transfer learning framework via integrating domain adaptation principles. The framework encompasses three integral components: a feature extraction module, an encoding module, and an RUL prediction module. During pre-training phase, the framework leverages a multiscale convolutional neural network to extract distinctive features from data across varying scales. The ensuing parameter transfer adopts a domain adaptation strategy centered around maximum mean discrepancy. This method efficiently facilitates the acquisition of domain-invariant features from the source and target domains. The refined domain adaptation Transformer-based multiscale convolutional neural network model exhibits enhanced suitability for predicting RUL in the target domain under the condition of limited samples. Experiments on the C-MAPSS dataset have shown that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Graphical Abstract