Fault diagnosis is vital in manufacturing system, since early detections on the emerging problem can save invaluable time and cost. With the development of smart manufacturing, the data-driven fault diagnosis becomes a hot topic. However, the traditional data-driven fault diagnosis methods rely on the features extracted by experts. The feature extraction process is an exhausted work and greatly impacts the final result. Deep learning (DL) provides an effective way to extract the features of raw data automatically. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is an effective DL method. In this study, a new CNN based on LeNet-5 is proposed for fault diagnosis. Through a conversion method converting signals into two-dimensional (2-D) images, the proposed method can extract the features of the converted 2-D images and eliminate the effect of handcrafted features. The proposed method which is tested on three famous datasets, including motor bearing dataset, self-priming centrifugal pump dataset, and axial piston hydraulic pump dataset, has achieved prediction accuracy of 99.79%, 99.481%, and 100%, respectively. The results have been compared with other DL and traditional methods, including adaptive deep CNN, sparse filter, deep belief network, and support vector machine. The comparisons show that the proposed CNN-based data-driven fault diagnosis method has achieved significant improvements.

Fault diagnosis plays an important role in modern industry. With the development of smart manufacturing, the data-driven fault diagnosis becomes hot. However, traditional methods have two shortcomings: 1) their performances depend on the good design of handcrafted features of data, but it is difficult to predesign these features and 2) they work well under a general assumption: the training data and testing data should be drawn from the same distribution, but this assumption fails in many engineering applications. Since deep learning (DL) can extract the hierarchical representation features of raw data, and transfer learning provides a good way to perform a learning task on the different but related distribution datasets, deep transfer learning (DTL) has been developed for fault diagnosis. In this paper, a new DTL method is proposed. It uses a three-layer sparse auto-encoder to extract the features of raw data, and applies the maximum mean discrepancy term to minimizing the discrepancy penalty between the features from training data and testing data. The proposed DTL is tested on the famous motor bearing dataset from the Case Western Reserve University. The results show a good improvement, and DTL achieves higher prediction accuracies on most experiments than DL. The prediction accuracy of DTL, which is as high as 99.82%, is better than the results of other algorithms, including deep belief network, sparse filter, artificial neural network, support vector machine and some other traditional methods. What is more, two additional analytical experiments are conducted. The results show that a good unlabeled third dataset may be helpful to DTL, and a good linear relationship between the final prediction accuracies and their standard deviations have been observed.

Image anomaly detection and segmentation are important for the development of automatic product quality inspection in intelligent manufacturing. Because the normal data can be collected easily and abnormal ones are rarely existent, unsupervised methods based on reconstruction and embedding have been mainly studied for anomaly detection. But the detection performance and computing time requires to be further improved. This paper proposes a novel framework, named as Pre-trained Feature Mapping (PFM), for unsupervised image anomaly detection and segmentation. The proposed PFM maps the image from a pre-trained feature space to another one to detect the anomalies effectively. The bidirectional and multi-hierarchical bidirectional pre-trained feature mapping are further proposed and studied for improving the performance. The proposed framework achieves the better results on well-known MVTec AD dataset compared with state-of-the-art methods, with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 97.5% for anomaly detection and of 97.3% for anomaly segmentation over all 15 categories. The proposed framework is also superior in term of the computing time. The extensive experiments on ablation studies are also conducted to show the effectiveness and efficient of the proposed framework.

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has gained increasing attention in fault classification. However, the performance of CNN is sensitive to its learning rate. Some previous works have been done to tune the learning rate, including the “trial and error” and manual search, which heavily depend on the experts' experiences and should be conducted repeatedly on every dataset. Because of the variety of the fault data, it is time-consuming and labor intensive to use these traditional tuning methods for fault classification. To overcome this problem, in this article, we develop a novel learning rate scheduler based on the reinforcement learning (RL) for convolutional neural network (RL-CNN) in fault classification, which can schedule the learning rate efficiently and automatically. First, a new RL agent is designed to learn the policies about the learning rate adjustment during the training process. Second, a new structure of RL-CNN is developed to balance the exploration and exploitation of the agent. Third, the bagging ensemble version of RL-CNN (RL-CNN-Ens) is presented. Three bearing datasets are used to test the performance of RL-CNN-Ens. The results show that RL-CNN-Ens outperforms the traditional DLs and machine learning methods. Meanwhile, RL-CNN-Ens can find the state-of-the-art learning rate schedulers as human designed, showing its potential in fault classification.

Fault diagnosis is vital for modern industry, and an increasing number of intelligent methods have been proposed for the fault diagnosis. However, most of the studies focus on distinguishing different fault patterns while ignoring fault deterioration. In this paper, a new hierarchical convolutional neural network (HCNN) is proposed as the two-level hierarchical diagnosis network, and it has two characteristics: 1) the fault pattern and fault severity are modeled as one hierarchical structure and 2) the fault pattern and fault severity can be estimated at the same time. Based on these, a new structure of HCNN is designed, which has two classifiers. Then, a two-stage training method is developed for HCNN to train these two classifiers at once training. The proposed HCNN is conducted on three case studies and has achieved state-of-the-art results. The results show that HCNN outperforms traditional two-layer hierarchical fault diagnosis network, and other machine learning and deep learning methods.