Intelligent decision support for maintenance: an overview and future trends

The changing nature of manufacturing, in recent years, is evident in industry’s willingness to adopt network-connected intelligent machines in their factory development plans. A number of joint corporate/government initiatives also describe and encourage the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the operation and management of production lines. Machine learning will have a significant role to play in the delivery of automated and intelligently supported maintenance decision-making systems. While e-maintenance practice provides aframework for internet-connected operation of maintenance practice the advent of IoT has changed the scale of internetworking and new architectures and tools are needed. While advances in sensors and sensor fusion techniques have been significant in recent years, the possibilities brought by IoT create new challenges in the scale of data and its analysis. The development of audit trail style practice for the collection of data and the provision of acomprehensive framework for its processing, analysis and use should be avaluable contribution in addressing the new data analytics challenges for maintenance created by internet connected devices. This paper proposes that further research should be conducted into audit trail collection of maintenance data, allowing future systems to enable ‘Human in the loop’ interactions

Automating Industrial Event Stream Analytics: Methods, Models, and Tools

Industrial event streams are an important cornerstone of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. For instance, in the manufacturing domain, such streams are typically produced by distributed industrial assets at high frequency on the shop floor. To add business value and extract the full potential of the data (e.g. through predictive quality assessment or maintenance), industrial event stream analytics is an essential building block. One major challenge is the distribution of required technical and domain knowledge across several roles, which makes the realization of analytics projects time-consuming and error-prone. For instance, accessing industrial data sources requires a high level of technical skills due to a large heterogeneity of protocols and formats. To reduce the technical overhead of current approaches, several problems must be addressed. The goal is to enable so-called "citizen technologists" to evaluate event streams through a self-service approach. This requires new methods and models that cover the entire data analytics cycle. In this thesis, the research question is answered, how citizen technologists can be facilitated to independently perform industrial event stream analytics. The first step is to investigate how the technical complexity of modeling and connecting industrial data sources can be reduced. Subsequently, it is analyzed how the event streams can be automatically adapted (directly at the edge), to meet the requirements of data consumers and the infrastructure. Finally, this thesis examines how machine learning models for industrial event streams can be trained in an automated way to evaluate previously integrated data. The main research contributions of this work are: 1. A semantics-based adapter model to describe industrial data sources and to automatically generate adapter instances on edge nodes. 2. An extension for publish-subscribe systems that dynamically reduces event streams while considering requirements of downstream algorithms. 3. A novel AutoML approach to enable citizen data scientists to train and deploy supervised ML models for industrial event streams. The developed approaches are fully implemented in various high-quality software artifacts. These have been integrated into a large open-source project, which enables rapid adoption of the novel concepts into real-world environments. For the evaluation, two user studies to investigate the usability, as well as performance and accuracy tests of the individual components were performed

D7.5 FIRST consolidated project results

The FIRST project commenced in January 2017 and concluded in December 2022, including a 24-month suspension period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the project, we successfully delivered seven technical reports, conducted three workshops on Key Enabling Technologies for Digital Factories in conjunction with CAiSE (in 2019, 2020, and 2022), produced a number of PhD theses, and published over 56 papers (and numbers of summitted journal papers). The purpose of this deliverable is to provide an updated account of the findings from our previous deliverables and publications. It involves compiling the original deliverables with necessary revisions to accurately reflect the final scientific outcomes of the project

Annals of Scientific Society for Assembly, Handling and Industrial Robotics 2021

This Open Access proceedings presents a good overview of the current research landscape of assembly, handling and industrial robotics. The objective of MHI Colloquium is the successful networking at both academic and management level. Thereby, the colloquium focuses an academic exchange at a high level in order to distribute the obtained research results, to determine synergy effects and trends, to connect the actors in person and in conclusion, to strengthen the research field as well as the MHI community. In addition, there is the possibility to become acquatined with the organizing institute. Primary audience is formed by members of the scientific society for assembly, handling and industrial robotics (WGMHI)