Incremental Learning-Enabled Fault Diagnosis of Dynamic Systems: A Comprehensive Review

Effective fault diagnosis is crucial for maintaining the reliability and safety of industrial systems. Incremental learning, which enables models to continuously update and adapt to new data or emerging fault classes without complete retraining, has recently gained attention as a promising solution for addressing nonstationary data streams in fault diagnosis applications. Nevertheless, most existing review articles on fault diagnosis adopt a broad perspective, primarily discussing general techniques such as deep learning and transfer learning, without providing a dedicated focus on incremental learning strategies. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first review focusing specifically on incremental learning-enabled fault diagnosis methods. In this work, state-of-the-art incremental learning-enabled fault diagnosis are systematically reviewed. These methods are categorized into distinct groups based on their incremental learning strategies and application contexts. In addition, major challenges associated with applying incremental learning to fault diagnosis, including concept drift and catastrophic forgetting, are discussed, along with emerging solutions proposed to address these issues. A novel taxonomy and perspective on incremental learning-enabled fault diagnosis approaches is presented, providing a timely and comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners in this evolving field.