GAN-Based Multi-Task Learning Approach for Prognostics and Health Management of IIoT

Health assessment (HA) & remaining useful life (RUL) estimation, the two essential pillars of the prognostics and health management (PHM) paradigm, help improve industrial equipment reliability while reducing maintenance costs. However, reported works treat HA and RUL estimation as disjoint problems though there exist unexploited similarities among these related issues. Additionally, in practical industrial working scenarios, equipment(s) stay in a normal condition for most of its lifespan, leading to a disproportionate training dataset, hampering the prediction accuracy. To overcome the above problems, we propose a data-driven multi-task learning framework aided by a novel least squares recurrent auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (LS-R-ACGAN). LS-R-ACGAN employs recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in its generator & discriminator networks for multi-variate fault data generation while overcoming the vanishing gradient problem of ACGANs. Post-data-augmentation, a balanced training dataset, trains a multi-task learning model based on a deep gated RNN (DGRU) for joint HA and RUL estimation. Our simulations use the C-MAPSS dataset for testing the proposed approach's accuracy. The final results showcase improvements by at least similar to 3.54% and similar to 2.38% on the RMSE and Score metric over existing state-of-the-art works suggesting its competitiveness and competence for real-world implementations.