Intelligent fault diagnosis for rotating machinery using deep Q-network based health state classification: A deep reinforcement learning approach

Fault diagnosis methods for rotating machinery have always been a hot research topic, and artificial intelligence-based approaches have attracted increasing attention from both researchers and engineers. Among those related studies and methods, artificial neural networks, especially deep learning-based methods, are widely used to extract fault features or classify fault features obtained by other signal processing techniques. Although such methods could solve the fault diagnosis problems of rotating machinery, there are still two deficiencies. (1) Unable to establish direct linear or non-linear mapping between raw data and the corresponding fault modes, the performance of such fault diagnosis methods highly depends on the quality of the extracted features. (2) The optimization of neural network architecture and parameters, especially for deep neural networks, requires considerable manual modification and expert experience, which limits the applicability and generalization of such methods. As a remarkable breakthrough in artificial intelligence, AlphaGo, a representative achievement of deep reinforcement learning, provides inspiration and direction for the aforementioned shortcomings. Combining the advantages of deep learning and reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning is able to build an end-to-end fault diagnosis architecture that can directly map raw fault data to the corresponding fault modes. Thus, based on deep reinforcement learning, a novel intelligent diagnosis method is proposed that is able to overcome the shortcomings of the aforementioned diagnosis methods. Validation tests of the proposed method are carried out using datasets of two types of rotating machinery, rolling bearings and hydraulic pumps, which contain a large number of measured raw vibration signals under different health states and working conditions. The diagnosis results show that the proposed method is able to obtain intelligent fault diagnosis agents that can mine the relationships between the raw vibration signals and fault modes autonomously and effectively. Considering that the learning process of the proposed method depends only on the replayed memories of the agent and the overall rewards, which represent much weaker feedback than that obtained by the supervised learning-based method, the proposed method is promising in establishing a general fault diagnosis architecture for rotating machinery.