Simulation-driven domain adaptation for few-shot gearbox fault assessment

Abstract

Abstract: This paper evaluates a simulation-driven domain adaptation (SDDA) workflow for few-shot gearbox fault assessment. The study addresses a key limitation of data-driven gearbox fault assessment methods, namely their reliance on large quantities of labelled fault data, which are rarely available in industrial applications. This work investigates whether physics-based simulated source data, a CNN-based data-driven classifier, and MK-MMD-based feature alignment can be effectively combined to assess gearbox faults under severely label-scarce target-domain conditions. The primary contribution of this work is the first systematic verification of a simulation-driven domain adaptation workflow for gearbox fault assessment under industrially relevant few-shot conditions and controlled simulation-to-real discrepancy factors. A comprehensive numerical investigation is conducted to evaluate the effect of the domain discrepancy factors, including model fidelity, sensor location, sensor noise, and physics-based modelling parameter mismatch. The results show that SDDA outperforms the source-only, target-only, and weight fine-tuning baselines across all investigated discrepancy conditions, with the relative performance gain degrading only under extreme sensor noise. The workflow is further evaluated through two experimental case studies using the Prognostics and Health Management datasets, PHM23 and PHM09. These case studies represent relatively well-aligned and substantially mismatched simulation-to-real transfer scenarios, respectively. In both cases, SDDA achieved higher fault detection performance than the considered baselines even with only a few labelled target-domain fault samples. These findings indicate that simulation-based approaches, when coupled with explicit domain alignment, can support data-efficient gearbox fault assessment in industrial environments where real fault data are scarce.

Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.