A Physics-Informed Hybrid Ensemble for Robust and High-Fidelity Temperature Forecasting in PMSMs

The deployment of artificial intelligence in safety-critical industrial systems is hindered by a core trust deficit, as models trained via empirical risk minimization often fail catastrophically in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. We address this challenge by developing a physics-informed hybrid ensemble that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) temperature forecasting. Our methodology first calibrates a Lumped-Parameter Thermal Network (LPTN) to serve as a physics engine for generating physically consistent data augmentations, which then pre-trains a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) encoder via self-supervision, with the final prediction assembled from the physics model’s baseline guess and a correction learned by an ensemble of gradient boosting models on a rich, multi-modal feature set. Evaluated against a suite of strong baselines, our hybrid ensemble achieves a state-of-the-art Root Mean Squared Error of 5.24 °C on a challenging OOD stress test composed of the most chaotic operational profiles. Most compellingly, our model’s performance improved by an unprecedented −10.68% under these extreme stress conditions where standard, purely data-driven models collapsed. This demonstrated robustness, combined with a statistically valid Coverage Under Shift (CUS) Gap of only 1.43%, provides a complete blueprint for building high-performance, trustworthy AI, enabling safer and more efficient control of critical cyber-physical systems and motivating future research into physics-guided pre-training for other industrial assets.