EAAI Journal 2026 Journal Article
Degradation-induced fault identification for component-stacked systems: A mechanism-informed, distribution-aware perspective
- Leiming Ma
- Bin Jiang
- Rui He
- Ningyun Lu
Component-stacked rotor systems are coupled through shared load paths and vibration transmission. Degradation in any component can change system-level structural parameters and introduce uncertainty into their evolution, thereby reshaping the measured features and apparent fault patterns. Fault identification should therefore account for degradation effects. In this study, we refer to this objective as degradation-induced fault identification. A key challenge is that failure histories capturing progressive degradation are often scarce. Purely data-driven models trained on such samples may learn feature distributions that do not adequately characterize degradation evolution and its associated fault modes. To address this issue, we develop a mechanism-informed generative modeling framework. In the physical model, structural parameters are modeled as stochastic variables following specified probability distributions, enabling the augmented data to better cover the underlying distribution of degradation-induced fault states. Additionally, we develop an uncertainty-guided attention mechanism that concentrates on long-term dependencies in high-uncertainty feature regions. It quantifies the uncertainty propagation from structural parameters to the learned feature space, and provides interpretable insights into degradation-induced fault manifestations. By integrating distributional parameter modeling with physical knowledge, the framework characterizes degradation variability and evolution within a unified model, demonstrating promising applicability in multi-component systems.