FIREMAN

"The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating a new structure of awareness – a cybernetic one – upon physical processes. Industries of different kinds are expected to join soon this revolution, leading to the so-called Factories of the Future or Industry 4.0. Our considered IoT-based industrial cyber-physical system (CPS) works in three generic steps: 1) Large data acquisition / dissemination: A physical process is monitored by sensors that pre-process the (assumed large) collected data and send the processed information to an intelligent node (e.g. aggregator, central controller); 2) Big data fusion: The intelligent node uses artificial intelligence (e.g. machine learning, data clustering, pattern recognition, neural networks) to convert the received (""big"") data to useful information to guide short-term operational decisions related to the physical process; 3) Big data analytics: The physical process together with the acquisition and fusion steps can be virtualized, building then a cyber-physical process, whose dynamic performance can be analysed and optimized through visualization (if human intervention is available) or artificial intelligence (if the decisions are automatic) or a combination thereof. We will focus on how to optimize the prediction, detection and respective interventions of rare events in industrial processes based on these three steps. Our proposed general framework, which relies on an IoT network, aims at ultra-reliable detection / prevention of rare events related to a pre-determined industrial physical process (modelled by a particular signal). The framework will be process-independent, but the actual solution will be designed case-by-case. We will consider the CPS working as a complex system so that these three steps, which operate with relative autonomy, are strongly interrelated. For example, the way the sensors measure the signal related to the physical process will affect what is the best data fusion algorithm, which in turn will generate a certain awareness of the physical process that will form the basis of the proposed data analytics procedure. As proof-of-concept, our approach will be applied to predictive maintenance in an automotive industrial plant from SEAT in Spain, in the Nokia base-station factory at Oulu and in the LUT laboratory of control engineering and digital systems. "