Predictive Maintenance in the Production of Steel Bars: A Data-Driven Approach

The ever increasing demand for shorter production times and reduced production costs require manufacturing firms to bring down their production costs while preserving a smooth and flexible production process. To this aim, manufacturers could exploit data-driven techniques to monitor and assess equipmen’s operational state and anticipate some future failure. Sensor data acquisition, analysis, and correlation can create the equipment’s digital footprint and create awareness on it through the entire life cycle allowing the shift from time-based preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance, reducing both maintenance and production costs. In this work, a novel data analytics workflow is proposed combining the evaluation of an asset’s degradation over time with a self-assessment loop. The proposed workflow can support real-time analytics at edge devices, thus, addressing the needs of modern cyber-physical production systems for decision-making support at the edge with short response times. A prototype implementation has been evaluated in use cases related to the steel industry

A Deep Learning Model for Predictive Maintenance in Cyber-Physical Production Systems Using LSTM Autoencoders

Condition monitoring of industrial equipment, combined with machine learning algorithms, may significantly improve maintenance activities on modern cyber-physical production systems. However, data of proper quality and of adequate quantity, modeling both good operational conditions as well as abnormal situations throughout the operational lifecycle, are required. Nevertheless, this is difficult to acquire in a non-destructive approach. In this context, this study investigates an approach to enable a transition from preventive maintenance activities, that are scheduled at predetermined time intervals, into predictive ones. In order to enable such approaches in a cyber-physical production system, a deep learning algorithm is used, allowing for maintenance activities to be planned according to the actual operational status of the machine and not in advance. An autoencoder-based methodology is employed for classifying real-world machine and sensor data, into a set of condition-related labels. Real-world data collected from manufacturing operations are used for training and testing a prototype implementation of Long Short-Term Memory autoencoders for estimating the remaining useful life of the monitored equipment. Finally, the proposed approach is evaluated in a use case related to a steel industry production process