Empowering IoT Predictive Maintenance Solutions With AI: A Distributed System for Manufacturing Plant-Wide Monitoring

The emergence of Industry 4.0 and the rapid advances in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) have provided manufacturers with the ability to remotely monitor the process by deploying automatic fault detection in an IoT-based predictive maintenance system. However, the monitoring targets are now manufacturing plant-wide instead of being just a local area. Multiple types of faults are involved and the conventional centralized cloud computing-based IoT solutions always lead to a heavy burden on the network bandwidth due to the large amount of sensor data collected frequently that has to be transmitted to the central server and this leads to poor response time for the monitoring system. To address this problem, this article develops an artificial intelligence-assisted distributed system for manufacturing plant-wide predictive maintenance applications. The developed distributed system relies on the feature selection technique to identity an optimal feature subset for each type of fault and is enabled by deploying each independent model built on the obtained feature subset into different edge nodes. The distributed approach enables the data to be processed near the sensors, requiring less data to be transmitted to the central cloud server reducing network delay and delivering more accurate results. In addition, our proposed feature selection approach is especially designed to accommodate the characteristics of IIoT data such as the lack of labels. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using the widely used public Tennessee Eastman dataset.