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Today's factories are considered as smart ecosystems with humans, machines and devices interacting with each other for efficient manufacturing of products. Industry 4.0 is a suite of enabler technologies for such smart ecosystems that allow transformation of industrial processes. When implemented, Industry 4.0 technologies have a huge impact on efficiency, productivity and profitability of businesses. The adoption and implementation of Industry 4.0, however, require to overcome a number of practical challenges, in most cases, due to the lack of modernisation and automation in place with traditional manufacturers. This paper presents a first of its kind case study for moving a traditional food manufacturer, still using the machinery more than one hundred years old, a common occurrence for small- and medium-sized businesses, to adopt the Industry 4.0 technologies. The paper reports the challenges we have encountered during the transformation process and in the development stage. The paper also presents a smart production control system that we have developed by utilising AI, machine learning, Internet of things, big data analytics, cyber-physical systems and cloud computing technologies. The system provides novel data collection, information extraction and intelligent monitoring services, enabling improved efficiency and consistency as well as reduced operational cost. The platform has been developed in real-world settings offered by an Innovate UK-funded project and has been integrated into the company's existing production facilities. In this way, the company has not been required to replace old machinery outright, but rather adapted the existing machinery to an entirely new way of operating. The proposed approach and the lessons outlined can benefit similar food manufacturing industries and other SME industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capabilities of self-awareness, self-prediction, and self-maintenance are important for textile factory in Industry 4.0. One of the most important issues is to intellectualize the way of setting operation parameters as the cyber-physical system (CPS), instead of using traditional trial and error method. To achieve these goals, this paper focuses on the relationship between key operation parameter and defect for machine learning to design an operation parameters recommender system (OPRS) in the textile industry. From the perspective of data science, this paper in- tegrates historic manufacturing process data, such as machine operation parameters from warping, sizing, beaming and weaving process, and management experience data, such as textile inspection results from quality control section. Then, the regression models are applied to predict the textile operation parameters. This research also uses the clas- sification models to predict the quality of textile. Based on the ten-fold cross-validation testing, experimental results show that our model can achieve 90.8% accuracy on quality level prediction and the best regression model for predict- ing weaving operation parameters can reduce the mean square error (MSE) to 0.01%. By combining the above two models, proposed OPRS can provide a completed analysis data of operation parameters. It provides good performance when comparing with previous stochastic methods. As the proposed OPRS can support technician setting operation parameters more precisely even for a new type of yarn, it can help to fix the tech skills gap in the textile manufacturing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, Industry 4.0 and the Smart Manufacturing environment are increasingly taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence. There are more and more sensors, cameras, vision systems and barcodes in the production area, as a result of which the volume of data recorded during manufacturing and assembly operations is growing extremely fast. The interpretation and processing of such production-type data by humans is no longer possible effectively. In the Big Data domain, machine learning is playing an increasingly important role within data mining. This paper focuses on the product change processes of semi-automatic assembly line batch production and examines the impact of product type changes on the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and attempts to determine future values through supervised machine learning. Using decision tree technology, the effect on the OEE value can be predicted with an accuracy of up to 1%. The presented data and conclusions come from a real industrial environment, so the obtained results are proven in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predictive maintenance is a field of study whose main objective is to optimize the timing and type of maintenance to perform on various industrial systems. This aim involves maximizing the availability time of the monitored system and minimizing the number of resources used in maintenance. Predictive maintenance is currently undergoing a revolution thanks to advances in industrial systems monitoring within the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Likewise, advances in artificial intelligence and data mining allow the processing of a great amount of data to provide more accurate and advanced predictive models. In this context, many actors have become interested in predictive maintenance research, becoming one of the most active areas of research in computing, where academia and industry converge. The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review that provides an overview of the current state of research concerning predictive maintenance from a data mining perspective. The review presents a first taxonomy that implies different phases considered in any data mining process to solve a predictive maintenance problem, relating the predictive maintenance tasks with the main data mining tasks to solve them. Finally, the paper presents significant challenges and future research directions in terms of the potential of data mining applied to predictive maintenance. This article is categorized under:Application Areas > Industry Specific ApplicationsTechnologies > Internet of Things [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of value in a factory is transforming. The spread of sensors, embedded systems, and the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) creates a multitude of possibilities relating to upcoming Real Time Analytics (RTA) application. However, already the topic of big data had rendered the use of analytical solutions related to a processing in real time. Now, the introduced methods and concepts can be transferred into the industrial area. This paper deals with the topic of the current state of RTA having the objective to identify applied methods. In addition, the paper also includes a classification of these methods and contains an outlook for the use of them within the area of the smart factory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial systems resources are capable of producing large amount of data. These data are often in heterogeneous formats and distributed, yet they provide means to mine the information which can allow the deployment of intelligent management tools for production activities. For this purpose, it is necessary to be able to implement knowledge extraction and prediction processes using Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, but the selection and configuration of intended AI models tend to be increasingly complex for a non-expert user. In this paper, we present an approach and a software platform that may allow industrial actors, who are usually not familiar with AI, to select and configure algorithms optimally adapted to their needs. Hence, the approach is essentially based on automated machine learning. The resulting platform effectively enables a better choice among the combination of AI algorithms and hyper-parameters configurations. It also makes it possible to provide features of explainability of the resulting algorithms and models, thus increasing the acceptability of these models in practicing community of the users. The proposed approach has been applied in the field of predictive maintenance. Current tests are based on the analysis of more than 360 databases from the subjected field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent trends in intelligent manufacturing are transforming shop floor environments into digital factories, thanks to a pervasive integration of information and communication technologies in production lines. Industrial processes become the source of high-volume heterogeneous data, paving the way to create manufacturing intelligence by means of machine learning and data-driven methodologies. In such settings, predictive diagnostics play a crucial role, as they promise to predict future critical conditions in the production process. Unfortunately, the diffusion of data-driven predictive maintenance methodologies is limited by (i) the absence of timely ground-truth knowledge (i.e., class labels), required in the learning phase of data-driven supervised approaches, and (ii) the limited availability of data-mining expertise among application-domain experts, required to harness the power of machine learning techniques. Innovative data-driven services are needed to support domain experts in (i) applying powerful self-learning intelligent techniques with limited technical expertise and (ii) easily understanding results and choices operated by such intelligent techniques, to increase trust by means of transparency. To this aim, this paper presents UDaMP, an integrated platform to support manufacturing intelligence by providing a transparent, self-tuning, unsupervised discovery and assisted data labelling service for predictive maintenance, specifically targeted at cyclic industrial processes. UDaMP includes (i) production-cycle-aware feature engineering, (ii) unsupervised discovery of production-cycle categories, (iii) self-tuning of the optimal number of categories, (iv) human-readable characterisation of production-cycle categories, and (v) assisted data labelling for domain experts. Scalable clustering algorithms automatically discover groups of production cycles sharing common time-independent properties. A self-tuning strategy is integrated to automatically configure the specific input parameter and select the best approach for the data under analysis. Each cluster is then locally characterised through the data distribution of the top 10 most relevant features to support domain experts in uncovering its meaning. Experimental evaluation of UDaMP has been performed on real-world data collected in two different industrial settings. • Semi-supervised labelling of production cycles for predictive maintenance. • Wide applicability to any cycle-based production process without ground truth labels. • Exploitable by domain experts thanks to transparent self-tuning techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]