Spatio-Temporal Attention Graph Neural Network for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Remaining useful life prediction plays a crucial role in the health management of industrial systems. Given the increasing complexity of systems, data-driven predictive models have attracted significant research interest. Upon reviewing the existing literature, it appears that many studies either do not fully integrate both spatial and temporal features or employ only a single attention mechanism. Furthermore, there seems to be inconsistency in the choice of data normalization methods, particularly concerning operating conditions, which might influence predictive performance. To bridge these observations, this study presents the Spatio-Temporal Attention Graph Neural Network. Our model combines graph neural networks and temporal convolutional neural networks for spatial and temporal feature extraction, respectively. The cascade of these extractors, combined with multi-head attention mechanisms for both spatio-temporal dimensions, aims to improve predictive precision and refine model explainability. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on the C-MAPSS dataset to evaluate the impact of unified versus clustering normalization. The findings suggest that our model performs state-of-the-art results using only the unified normalization. Additionally, when dealing with datasets with multiple operating conditions, cluster normalization enhances the performance of our proposed model by up to 27%.