Combining empirical mode decomposition and deep recurrent neural networks for predictive maintenance of lithium-ion battery

Predictive maintenance of lithium-ion batteries has been one of the popular research subjects in recent years. Lithium-ion batteries can be used as the energy supply for industrial equipment, such as automated guided vehicles and battery electric vehicles. Predictive maintenance plays an important role in the application of smart manufacturing. This mechanism can provide different levels of pre-diagnosis for machines or components. Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is crucial for the implementation of predictive maintenance strategies. RUL refers to the estimated useful life remaining before the machine cannot operate after a certain period of operation. This study develops a hybrid data science model based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD), grey relational analysis (GRA), and deep recurrent neural networks (RNN) for the RUL prediction of lithium-ion batteries. The EMD and GRA methods are first adopted to extract the characteristics of time series data. Then, various deep RNNs, including vanilla RNN, gated recurrent unit, long short-term memory network (LSTM), and bidirectional LSTM, are established to forecast state of health (SOH) and the RUL of lithium-ion batteries. Bayesian optimization is also used to find the best hyperparameters of deep RNNs. Experimental results with the lithium-ion batteries data of NASA Ames Prognostics Data Repository show that the proposed hybrid data science model can accurately predict the SOH and RUL of lithium-ion batteries. The LSTM network has the optimal results. The proposed hybrid data science model with multiple artificial intelligence-based technologies also demonstrates critical digital-technology enablers for digital transformation of smart manufacturing and transportation.