Building of transformer-based RUL predictors supported by explainability techniques: application on real industrial datasets

One of the key aspects of Industry 4.0 is using intelligent systems to optimize manufacturing processes by improving productivity and reducing costs. These systems have greatly impacted in different areas, such as demand prediction and quality assessment. However, the prognostics and health manageme...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Dintén Herrero, Ricardo, Zorrilla Pantaleón, Marta E.|||0000-0002-0475-8834, Veloso, Bruno, Gama, João
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2026
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Cantabria (UC)
Repositorio:UCrea Repositorio Abierto de la Universidad de Cantabria
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.unican.es:10902/38558
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10902/38558
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Deep Learning
RUL
XAI
Industry 4.0 & 5.0
Industrial Datasets
Descripción
Sumario:One of the key aspects of Industry 4.0 is using intelligent systems to optimize manufacturing processes by improving productivity and reducing costs. These systems have greatly impacted in different areas, such as demand prediction and quality assessment. However, the prognostics and health management of industrial equipment is one of the areas with greater potential. This paper presents a comparative analysis of deep learning architectures applied to the prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL) on public real industrial datasets. The analysis includes some of the most commonly employed recurrent neural network variations and a novel approach based on a hybrid architecture using transformers. Moreover, we apply explainability techniques to provide comprehensive insights into the model's decision-making process. The contributions of the work are: (1) a novel transformer-based architecture for RUL prediction that outperforms traditional recurrent neural networks; (2) a detailed description of the design strategies used to construct the models on two under-explored datasets; (3) the use of explainability techniques to understand the feature importance and to explain the model's prediction and (4) making models built for reproducibility available to other researchers.