Intelligent Tool-Wear Prediction Based on Informer Encoder and Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory

Herein, to accurately predict tool wear, we proposed a new deep learning network—that is, the IE-Bi-LSTM—based on an informer encoder and bi-directional long short-term memory. The IE-Bi-LSTM uses the encoder part of the informer model to capture connections globally and to extract long feature sequences with rich information from multichannel sensors. In contrast to methods using CNN and RNN, this model could achieve remote feature extraction and the parallel computation of long-sequence-dependent features. The informer encoder adopts the attention distillation layer to increase computational efficiency, thereby lowering the attention computational overhead in comparison to that of a transformer encoder. To better collect location information while maintaining serialization properties, a bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network was employed. After the fully connected layer, the tool-wear prediction value was generated. After data augmentation, the PHM2010 basic dataset was used to check the effectiveness of the model. A comparison test revealed that the model could learn more full features and had a strong prediction accuracy after hyperparameter tweaking. An ablation experiment was also carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of the improved model module.