Remaining Useful Life Estimation Combining Two-Step Maximal Information Coefficient and Temporal Convolutional Network With Attention Mechanism

Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation has received extensive attention in many fields, which provides improved decision-making for condition-based maintenance (CBM) and enhances the stability of engineered systems. However, the effective construction of the feature set and design of the high-accuracy prediction model are the main challenges in RUL estimation. Consequently, a novel RUL estimation method is proposed in this paper. Initially, to extract the deep characteristics of the raw sensor data, the modified ensemble empirical mode decomposition (MEEMD), combined with the correlation coefficient threshold to select the sensitive intrinsic mode function (IMF) components, is proposed to reconstruct more representative features. Additionally, maximal information coefficient-based two-step feature selection (TSMIC) method is used to select the optimal feature subset. Ultimately, temporal convolutional network with attention mechanism (TCNA) is proposed to capture long-term time-series information and achieves more precise prediction results. The proposed framework is verified through a case study on aircraft turbofan engines, and comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods are presented. The experimental results of the case study show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.