Deep multi-scale adversarial network with attention: A novel domain adaptation method for intelligent fault diagnosis*

Data driven-based intelligent fault diagnosis methods, as a promising approach, have been widely employed in the health management and maintenance decision of rotating machinery. However, the domain shift phenomenon caused by internal and external interference inevitably exists in practical application scenarios, which significantly deteriorates the performances of the intelligent diagnosis model. And the preparation of label information in real complex scenes is usually time-consuming and expensive. To overcome these challenges, a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework named deep multi-scale adversarial network with attention (MSANA) is introduced for machinery fault diagnosis. It is established based on two main components, one is the shared feature generator, which is constructed by two novel multi-scale modules with attention mechanism, and the other part is a fault pattern recognition module composed of two differentiated discriminators. While the multi-scale module is used to obtain rich features through different internal perceptual scales, the attention mechanism determines the weights of different scales, which promotes the dynamic adjustment performance and adaptive ability of the model. Then, decision boundary assisted adversarial learning strategy is employed to eliminate domain distribution differences and obtain domain-invariant features. A total of ten rolling bearing based transfer scenarios and six gearbox-based transfer scenarios are adopted to evaluate the transferability of the proposed MSANA model, and the cross-domain transfer results show that it has superior transferability and stability. Data driven-based intelligent fault diagnosis methods, as a promising approach, have been widely employed in the health management and maintenance decision of rotating machinery. However, the domain shift phenomenon caused by internal and external interference inevitably exists in practical application scenarios, which significantly deteriorates the performances of the intelligent diagnosis model. And the preparation of label information in real complex scenes is usually time-consuming and expensive. To overcome these challenges, a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework named deep multi-scale adversarial network with attention (MSANA) is introduced for machinery fault diagnosis. It is established based on two main components, one is the shared feature generator, which is constructed by two novel multi-scale modules with attention mechanism, and the other part is a fault pattern recognition module composed of two differentiated discriminators. While the multi-scale module is used to obtain rich features through different internal perceptual scales, the attention mechanism determines the weights of different scales, which promotes the dynamic adjustment performance and adaptive ability of the model. Then, decision boundary assisted adversarial learning strategy is employed to eliminate domain distribution differences and obtain domain-invariant features. A total of ten rolling bearing based transfer scenarios and six gearbox-based transfer scenarios are adopted to evaluate the transferability of the proposed MSANA model, and the cross-domain transfer results show that it has superior transferability and stability.

Automated summary

Data-driven intelligent fault diagnosis methods are widely used in the health management and maintenance decision-making of rotating machinery. However, domain shift phenomena and label information preparation can affect performance. To address these challenges, a novel MSANA framework with multi-scale modules and attention mechanisms is introduced to improve transferability and stability.