  We consider the problem of estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of a
system or a machine from sensor data. Many approaches for RUL estimation based
on sensor data make assumptions about how machines degrade. Additionally,
sensor data from machines is noisy and often suffers from missing values in
many practical settings. We propose Embed-RUL: a novel approach for RUL
estimation from sensor data that does not rely on any degradation-trend
assumptions, is robust to noise, and handles missing values. Embed-RUL utilizes
a sequence-to-sequence model based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to
generate embeddings for multivariate time series subsequences. The embeddings
for normal and degraded machines tend to be different, and are therefore found
to be useful for RUL estimation. We show that the embeddings capture the
overall pattern in the time series while filtering out the noise, so that the
embeddings of two machines with similar operational behavior are close to each
other, even when their sensor readings have significant and varying levels of
noise content. We perform experiments on publicly available turbofan engine
dataset and a proprietary real-world dataset, and demonstrate that Embed-RUL
outperforms the previously reported state-of-the-art on several metrics.
