Deep continual transfer learning with dynamic weight aggregation for fault diagnosis of industrial streaming data under varying working conditions

Catastrophic forgetting of learned knowledges and distribution discrepancy of different data are two key problems within fault diagnosis fields of rotating machinery. However, existing intelligent fault diagnosis methods generally tackle either the catastrophic forgetting problem or the domain adaptation problem. In complex industrial environments, both the catastrophic forgetting problem and the domain adaptation problem will occur simultaneously, which is termed as continual transfer problem. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate a more practical and challenging task where the number of fault categories are constantly increasing with industrial streaming data under varying operation conditions. To address the continual transfer problem, a novel framework named deep continual transfer learning network with dynamic weight aggregation (DCTLN-DWA) is proposed in this study. The DWA module is used to retain the diagnostic knowledge learned from previous phases and learn new knowledge from the new samples. The adversarial training strategy is applied to eliminate the data distribution discrepancy between source and target domains. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is investigated on an automobile transmission dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively handle the industrial streaming data under different working conditions and can be utilized as a promising tool for solving actual industrial problem.