Transfer Learning-Motivated Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Designs: A Survey, Insights, and Perspectives

Over the last decade, transfer learning has attracted a great deal of attention as a new learning paradigm, based on which fault diagnosis (FD) approaches have been intensively developed to improve the safety and reliability of modern automation systems. Because of inevitable factors such as the varying work environment, performance degradation of components, and heterogeneity among similar automation systems, the FD method having long-term applicabilities becomes attractive. Motivated by these facts, transfer learning has been an indispensable tool that endows the FD methods with self-learning and adaptive abilities. On the presentation of basic knowledge in this field, a comprehensive review of transfer learning-motivated FD methods, whose two subclasses are developed based on knowledge calibration and knowledge compromise, is carried out in this survey article. Finally, some open problems, potential research directions, and conclusions are highlighted. Different from the existing reviews of transfer learning, this survey focuses on how to utilize previous knowledge specifically for the FD tasks, based on which three principles and a new classification strategy of transfer learning-motivated FD techniques are also presented. We hope that this work will constitute a timely contribution to transfer learning-motivated techniques regarding the FD topic.