Applied Machine Learning for IIoT and Smart Production-Methods to Improve Production Quality, Safety and Sustainability

Strategies for overcoming data scarcity, imbalance, and feature selection challenges in machine learning models for predictive maintenance

Predictive maintenance harnesses statistical analysis to preemptively identify equipment and system faults, facilitating cost- effective preventive measures. Machine learning algorithms enable comprehensive analysis of historical data, revealing emerging patterns and accurate predictions of impending system failures. Common hurdles in applying ML algorithms to PdM include data scarcity, data imbalance due to few failure instances, and the temporal dependence nature of PdM data. This study proposes an ML-based approach that adapts to these hurdles through the generation of synthetic data, temporal feature extraction, and the creation of failure horizons. The approach employs Generative Adversarial Networks to generate synthetic data and LSTM layers to extract temporal features. ML algorithms trained on the generated data achieved high accuracies: ANN (88.98%), Random Forest (74.15%), Decision Tree (73.82%), KNN (74.02%), and XGBoost (73.93%).

Monitoring and Control Framework for IoT, Implemented for Smart Agriculture

To mitigate the effects of the lack of IoT standardization, including scalability, reusability, and interoperability, we propose a domain-agnostic monitoring and control framework (MCF) for the design and implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) systems. We created building blocks for the layers of the five-layer IoT architecture and built the MCF's subsystems (monitoring subsystem, control subsystem, and computing subsystem). We demonstrated the utilization of MCF in a real-world use-case in smart agriculture, using off-the-shelf sensors and actuators and an open-source code. As a user guide, we discuss the necessary considerations for each subsystem and evaluate our framework in terms of its scalability, reusability, and interoperability (issues that are often overlooked during development). Aside from the freedom to choose the hardware used to build complete open-source IoT solutions, the MCF use-case was less expensive, as revealed by a cost analysis that compared the cost of implementing the system using the MCF to obtain commercial solutions. Our MCF is shown to cost up to 20 times less than normal solutions, while serving its purpose. We believe that the MCF eliminated the domain restriction found in many IoT frameworks and serves as a first step toward IoT standardization. Our framework was shown to be stable in real-world applications, with the code not incurring a significant increase in power utilization, and could be operated using common rechargeable batteries and a solar panel. In fact, our code consumed so little power that the usual amount of energy was two times higher than what is necessary to keep the batteries full. We also show that the data provided by our framework are reliable through the use of multiple different sensors operating in parallel and sending similar data at a stable rate, without significant differences between the readings. Lastly, the elements of our framework can exchange data in a stable way with very few package losses, being able to read over 1.5 million data points in the course of three months.