Abstract:

In order to improve the life prediction effect of elevator brake in the real working environment, an unsupervised deep transfer learning (UDTL) method based on long short-term memory encoder-decoder (LSTM-ED) was proposed. The simulation data were used to analyze the health status of brake when it was working. First, the LSTM-ED and the fully connected network were initially trained through the source domain data. Then, the LSTM-ED was used as a feature extractor to map the simulated and actual data to the feature space, and the maximum mean discrepancy was adopted to achieve data alignment. Finally, the target domain data in the feature space was regressed through the fully connected network to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of the real brake. In the training phase, a step-by-step training method was used to ensure the accuracy of a single module. The validity was verified by comparing the experimental simulation data with the real working data in the elevator tower. The results show that by introducing the transfer learning and step-by-step training methods, the proposed method can reduce the mean square error of RUL prediction to 0.0016, and can achieve accurate RUL prediction of elevator brakes in real working environment.

Key words: elevator brake, unsupervised deep transfer learning (UDTL), long short-term memory encoder-decoder (LSTM-ED), remaining useful life (RUL), step training