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In the Industry 4.0 era, a myriad of sensors of diverse nature (temperature, pressure, etc.) is spreading throughout the entire value chain of industries, being potentially exploitable for multiple purposes, such as Predictive Maintenance (PdM): the just-in-time maintenance of industrial assets, which results in reduced operating costs, increased operator safety, etc. Nowadays, industrial processes require to be highly configurable, in order to proactively adapt their operation to diverse factors such as user needs, product updates or supply chain uncertainties. This limits current Industry 4.0-PdM solutions, typically consisting of ad-hoc developments intended for specific scenarios, i.e. they are designed to operate under certain conditions (configurations, employed sensors, etc.), being unable to manage changes in their setup. This paper presents a general Deep Learning (DL) architecture, MachNet, which deals with such heterogeneity and is able to address PdM problems of a diverse nature. The modularity of the proposed architecture enables it to deal with an arbitrary number of sensors of different types, also allowing the integration of prior information (age of assets, material type, etc.), which clearly affects performance and is often neglected. In practice, our architecture effortlessly adapts to the assets' specifications and to different PdM problems. That is, MachNet becomes an architectural template that can be instantiated for a given scenario. We tested our proposal in two different PdM-related problems: Health State (HS) and Remaining-useful-Life (RuL) estimation, achieving in both cases comparable or superior performance to other state-of-the-art approaches, with the additional advantage of the generality that MachNet offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the railway domain, rolling stock maintenance affects service operation time and efficiency. Minimizing train unavailability is essential for reducing capital loss and operational costs. To this aim, prediction of failures of rolling stock equipment is crucial to proactively trigger proper maintenance activities. Indeed, predictive maintenance is a golden example of the digital transformation within Industry 4.0, which affects several engineering processes in the railway domain. Nowadays, it may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to forecast failures and schedule the optimal time for maintenance actions. Generally, rail systems deteriorate gradually over time or fail directly, leading to data that vary extremely slowly. Indeed, ML approaches for predictive maintenance should consider this type of data to accurately predict and forecast failures. This paper proposes a methodology based on Long Short-Term Memory deep learning algorithms for predictive maintenance of railway rolling stock equipment. The methodology allows us to properly learn long-term dependencies for gradually changing data, and both predicting and forecasting failures of rail equipment. In the framework of an academic-industrial partnership, the methodology is experimented on a train traction converter cooling system, demonstrating its applicability and benefits. The results show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods, reaching a failure prediction and forecasting accuracy over 99%, with a false alarm rate of ∼ 0. 4 % and a mean absolute error in the order of 1 0 − 4 , respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]