Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Rail Based on Improved Pulse Separable Convolution Enhanced Transformer Encoder

Abstract

In order to prevent possible casualties and economic loss, it is critical to accurate prediction of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) in rail prognostics health management. However, the traditional neural networks is difficult to capture the long-term dependency relationship of the time series in the modeling of the long time series of rail damage, due to the coupling relationship of multi-channel data from multiple sensors. Here, in this paper, a novel RUL prediction model with an enhanced pulse separable convolution is used to solve this issue. Firstly, a coding module based on the improved pulse separable convolutional network is established to effectively model the relationship between the data. To enhance the network, an alternate gradient back propagation method is implemented. And an efficient channel attention (ECA) mechanism is developed for better emphasizing the useful pulse characteristics. Secondly, an optimized Transformer encoder was designed to serve as the backbone of the model. It has the ability to efficiently understand relationship between the data itself and each other at each time step of long time series with a full life cycle. More importantly, the Transformer encoder is improved by integrating pulse maximum pooling to retain more pulse timing characteristics. Finally, based on the characteristics of the front layer, the final predicted RUL value was provided and served as the end-to-end solution. The empirical findings validate the efficacy of the suggested approach in forecasting the rail RUL, surpassing various existing data-driven prognostication techniques. Meanwhile, the proposed method also shows good generalization performance on PHM2012 bearing data set.