CdualTAL: Multi-Domain Tool Wear Prediction Using a Dual-Channel Transformer and Cross-Attention Network

Accurate tool wear prediction is crucial for manufacturing efficiency, yet effectively using multi-domain sensor features is difficult due to redundant noise. There is a critical need to strategically leverage highly predictive strong features and potentially informative weak features. To address this issue, we propose CdualTAL, an improved Transformer-based encoder-attention-decoder algorithm. Its name represents the model's key components: a correlation-adaptive feature selection algorithm module, a dual-channel Transformer encoder, an attention mechanism, and a long short-term memory (LSTM) decoder. CdualTAL employs a dual-channel encoder to independently process the full set of multi-domain features, along with a subset of strong features selected using a designed correlation-adaptive feature selection algorithm. A custom cross-attention mechanism is then used to fuse these representations, sharpening focus on strong features while judiciously integrating information from weak ones. Finally, a hierarchical LSTM decoder captures deep temporal dependencies. Validated on tool wear datasets, CdualTAL outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior prediction stability and accuracy with an average R2of 0.983 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 4.373.