Toward cognitive predictive maintenance: A survey of graph-based approaches

In the context of Industry 4.0, companies understand the advantages of performing Predictive Maintenance (PdM). However, when moving towards PdM, several considerations must be carefully examined. First, they need to have a sufficient number of production machines and relative fault data to generate maintenance predictions. Second, they need to adopt the right maintenance approach, which, ideally, should self-adapt to the machinery, priorities of the organization, technician skills, but also to be able to deal with uncertainty. Reinforcement learning (RL) is envisioned as a key technique in this regard due to its inherent ability to learn by interacting through trials and errors, but very few RL-based maintenance frameworks have been proposed so far in the literature, or are limited in several respects. This paper proposes a new multi-agent approach that learns a maintenance policy performed by technicians, under the uncertainty of multiple machine failures. This approach comprises RL agents that partially observe the state of each machine to coordinate the decision-making in maintenance scheduling, resulting in the dynamic assignment of maintenance tasks to technicians (with different skills) over a set of machines. Experimental evaluation shows that our RL-based maintenance policy outperforms traditional maintenance policies (incl., corrective and preventive ones) in terms of failure prevention and downtime, improving by ≈75% the overall performance. 

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Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning based Predictive Maintenance on parallel machines

Systems-based approach to contemporary business management: An enabler of business sustainability in a context of industry 4.0, circular economy, competitiveness and diverse stakeholders

Today, in a smart manufacturing environment based on the Industry 4.0 paradigm, people, technological infrastructure and machinery equipped with sensors can constantly generate and communicate a huge volume of data, also known as Big Data. The manufacturing industry takes advantage of Big Data and analytics evolution by improving its capability to bring out valuable information and knowledge from industrial processes, production systems and sensors. The adoption of model-based frameworks in the Big Data Analytics pipeline can better address user configuration requirements (e.g. type of analysis to perform, type of algorithm to be applied) and also provide more transparency and clearness on the execution of workflows and data processing. In the current state of art, an application of a model-based framework in a manufacturing scenario is missing. Therefore, in this study, by means of a case study research focused on data from sensors associated with Computer Numerical Control machines, the configuration and execution of a Big Data Analytics pipeline with a Model-based Big Data Analytics-as-a-Service framework is described. The case study provides to theoreticians and managerial experts useful evidence for managing real-time data analytics and deploying a workflow that addresses specific analytical goals, driven by user requirements and developer models, in a complex manufacturing domain. 

Model-based Big Data Analytics-as-a-Service framework in smart manufacturing: A case study

With the potential of Industry 4.0 technologies to enable sustainable manufacturing, asset life cycle management (ALCM) has been gaining increasing attention in recent years. This study explores the evolution of Industry 4.0 technology applications to sustainable ALCM from 2002 to 2021. This study is based on keywords collected from 3896 ALCM-related scientific articles published in the Web of Science, IEEE Xplore and Engineering Village between 2002 and 2021. We conducted a review analysis of these keywords using a network science-based methodology, which unlike the tedious traditional literature review methods, gives the capability to analyze a huge number of scientific articles efficiently. We built keyword co-occurrence networks (KCNs) from the keywords and explored the network characteristics to uncover meaningful knowledge patterns, knowledge components, knowledge structure, and research trends in the body of literature at the intersection of ALCM and Industry 4.0. The network modeling and data analysis results identify the emerging Industry 4.0-related keywords in ALCM literature and indicate the recent explosion of connectivity among keywords. We found IoT, predictive maintenance and big data to be the top three most popular Industry 4.0-related keywords in ALCM literature. Furthermore, this study maps relevant ALCM keywords in contemporary literature to the nine pillars of Industry 4.0 to help the responsible manufacturing community identify research trends and emerging technologies for sustainability.

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Trends in Adopting Industry 4.0 for Asset Life Cycle Management for Sustainability: A Keyword Co-Occurrence Network Review and Analysis

In the context of Industry 4.0, smart factories use advanced sensing and data analytic technologies to understand and monitor the manufacturing processes. To enhance production efficiency and reliability, statistical Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning and data mining are used to detect and predict potential anomalies within manufacturing processes. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of industrial data, sometimes the knowledge extracted from industrial data is presented in a complex structure. This brings the semantic gap issue which stands for the lack of interoperability among different manufacturing systems. Furthermore, as the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are becoming more knowledge-intensive, uniform knowledge representation of physical resources and real-time reasoning capabilities for analytic tasks are needed to automate the decision-making processes for these systems. These requirements highlight the potential of using symbolic AI for predictive maintenance. To automate and facilitate predictive analytics in Industry 4.0, in this paper, we present a novel Knowledge-based System for Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0 (KSPMI). KSPMI is developed based on a novel hybrid approach that leverages both statistical and symbolic AI technologies. The hybrid approach involves using statistical AI technologies such as machine learning and chronicle mining (a special type of sequential pattern mining approach) to extract machine degradation models from industrial data. On the other hand, symbolic AI technologies, especially domain ontologies and logic rules, will use the extracted chronicle patterns to query and reason on system input data with rich domain and contextual knowledge. This hybrid approach uses Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules generated from chronicle patterns together with domain ontologies to perform ontology reasoning, which enables the automatic detection of machinery anomalies and the prediction of future events’ occurrence. KSPMI is evaluated and tested on both real-world and synthetic data sets.

KSPMI: A Knowledge-based System for Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is a fundamental concept in the Reference Architecture Model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), that provides a virtual and digital representation of all information and functions of a physical asset in a manufacturing environment. Recently, Semantic AASs have emerged that add knowledge representation formalisms to enhance the digital representation of physical assets. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the scientific contributions to Semantic AASs that model the Information and Communication Layer within RAMI 4.0, and summarise and demonstrate their structure, communication, functionalities, and use cases. We also highlight the challenges of future development of Semantic AASs.

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Semantic Asset Administration Shells in Industry 4.0: A Survey

This paper introduces the Steel Cold Rolling Ontology (SCRO) to model and capture domain knowledge of cold rolling processes and activities within a steel plant. A case study is set up that uses real-world cold rolling data sets to validate the performance and functionality of SCRO. This includes using the Ontop framework to deploy virtual knowledge graphs for data access, data integration, data querying, and condition-based maintenance purposes. SCRO is evaluated using OOPS!, the ontology pitfall detection system, and feedback from domain experts from Tata Steel.

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Qiushi Cao

Papers

KSPMI: A Knowledge-based System for Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0

Semantic Asset Administration Shells in Industry 4.0: A Survey

SCRO: A Domain Ontology for Describing Steel Cold Rolling Processes towards Industry 4.0