Remaining Useful Life Prediction for Aero-Engines Based on Multi-Scale Dilated Fusion Attention Model

Abstract

To address the limitations of CNNs and RNNs in handling complex operating conditions, multi-scale degradation patterns, and long-term dependencies—with attention mechanisms often failing to highlight key degradation features—this paper proposes a remaining useful life (RUL) prediction framework based on a multi-scale dilated fusion attention (MDFA) module. The MDFA leverages parallel dilated convolutions with varying dilation rates to expand receptive fields, while a global-pooling branch captures sequence-level degradation trends. Additionally, integrated channel and spatial attention mechanisms enhance the model’s ability to emphasize informative features and suppress noise, thereby improving overall prediction robustness. The proposed method is evaluated on NASA’s C-MAPSS and N-CMAPSS datasets, achieving MAE values of 0.018–0.026, RMSE values of 0.021–0.032, and R2 scores above 0.987, demonstrating superior accuracy and stability compared to existing baselines. Furthermore, to verify generalization across domains, experiments on the PHM2012 bearing dataset show similar performance (MAE: 0.023–0.026, RMSE: 0.031–0.032, R2: 0.987–0.995), confirming the model’s effectiveness under diverse operating conditions and its adaptability to different degradation behaviors. This study provides a practical and interpretable deep-learning solution for RUL prediction, with broad applicability to aero-engine prognostics and other industrial health-monitoring tasks.