A Knowledge-Enhanced Spatiotemporal Framework for Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Aero-Engines

Abstract

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is critical for improving reliability and supporting predictive maintenance in aero-engine systems. However, existing methods have limitations in jointly modeling the spatial correlations between multi-sensor signals and the temporal evolution characteristics of the degradation process. Hence, this study develops a knowledge-enhanced spatiotemporal framework for system-level aero-engine RUL prediction. Firstly, a graph based on the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) is constructed from monitoring data to capture data-driven dependencies among sensors. Afterwards, a thermodynamic-cycle-mechanism prior is incorporated into the PCC-based graph through the Hadamard product, forming a knowledge-enhanced graph that emphasizes physically meaningful sensor relationships. Subsequently, an enhanced graph attention module is designed to extract discriminative spatial representations from the knowledge-enhanced graph. Furthermore, relational representations between adjacent time steps are constructed to capture implicit temporal correlations and local degradation dynamics. Finally, a dual-stream GRU with an attention mechanism is employed to model the fused feature stream and relational feature stream for RUL prediction. Experiments on the CMAPSS and N-CMAPSS datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive and overall superior performance compared with nine state-of-the-art methods. KESTF achieves the best average RMSE/Score of 12.83/580 on CMAPSS and 5.94/3468 on N-CMAPSS, validating its effectiveness and robustness.