A review on adversarial–based deep transfer learning mechanical fault diagnosis

Abstract

Mechanical equipment is a vital foundational support for promoting national economic development and is widely utilized in key sectors such as aerospace, shipping, construction machinery, energy, petrochemicals, and robotics. With the advancement of artificial intelligence and industrial intelligence, industrial big data and its intelligent analysis provide robust support for fault prediction and health management of equipment. Building on existing research, intelligent diagnostics for mechanical equipment based on deep learning have gained significant attention and application. However, the success of big data relies on comprehensive fault data, which is challenging to obtain in practical applications where continuous equipment operation is essential. Moreover, mechanical equipment often operates under varying conditions, leading to different data distributions for training and testing. This discrepancy can result in low diagnostic accuracy or even failure of deep learning methods. Deep Transfer Learning (DTL) is an emerging machine learning paradigm that not only leverages the advantages of deep learning (DL) in feature representation but also harnesses the strengths of transfer learning (TL) in knowledge transfer. Consequently, DTL techniques can make deep learning-based fault diagnosis methods more reliable, robust, and applicable, leading to extensive development and research in the field of intelligent fault diagnosis. This paper primarily introduces adversarial-based deep transfer learning (ADTL) models, which are fundamentally based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We provide a detailed discussion of the main applications of ADTL and its recent developments in intelligent fault diagnosis, along with some future challenges and prospects.