An Aero-Engine RUL Prediction Method Based on VAE-GAN

As an important index of aero-engine, Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is the key content of prediction. Due to the good generation characteristics of Variational Auto-encoder (VAE) and Generation Adversarial Network (GAN) networks, this paper proposes a Health Index (HI) curve generation method based on VAE-GAN. After that, sensor sequence prediction is carried out through Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network (BLSTM). The two networks are parallel, and then RUL prediction is carried out by synthesizing the data of the two networks. As far as the author knows, this is the first use of VAE-GAN in Prognostics Health Management (PHM). It is verified on the Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation (C-MAPSS) dataset. Finally, the results show that the VAE-GAN network is effective and superior in RUL prediction. At the same time, the proposed parallel network is superior to other RUL prediction methods by generating HI curves.