Simultaneous Bearing Fault Recognition and Remaining Useful Life Prediction Using Joint-Loss Convolutional Neural Network

Fault diagnosis and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction are always two major issues in modern industrial systems, which are usually regarded as two separated tasks to make the problem easier but ignore the fact that there are certain information of these two tasks that can be shared to improve the performance. Therefore, to capture common features between different relative problems, a joint-loss convolutional neural network (JL-CNN) architecture is proposed in this paper, which can implement bearing fault recognition and RUL prediction in parallel by sharing the parameters and partial networks, meanwhile keeping the output layers of different tasks. The JL-CNN is constructed based on a CNN, which is a widely used deep learning method because of its powerful feature extraction ability. During optimization phase, a JL function is designed to enable the proposed approach to learn the diagnosis-prognosis features and improve generalization while reducing the overfitting risk and computation cost. Moreover, because the information behind the signals of different problems has been shared and exploited deeper, the generalization and the accuracy of results can also be improved. Finally, the effectiveness of the JL-CNN method is validated by run-to-failure dataset. Compared with support vector regression and traditional CNN, the mean-square-error of the proposed method decreases 82.7% and 24.9%, respectively. Therefore, results and comparisons show that the proposed method can be applied for the intercrossed applications between fault diagnosis and RUL prediction.