Enabling predictive maintenance integrated production scheduling by operation-specific health prognostics with generative deep learning

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) is one of the core innovations in recent years that sparks interest in both research and industry. While researchers develop more and more complex machine learning (ML) models to predict the remaining useful life (RUL), most models are not designed with regard to actual industrial practice and are not validated with industrial data. To overcome this gap between research and industry and to create added value, we propose a holistic framework that aims at directly integrating PdM models with production scheduling. To enable PdM-integrated production scheduling (PdM-IPS), an operation-specific health prognostics model is required. Therefore, we propose a generative deep learning model based on the conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) that can derive an operation-specific health indicator (HI) from large-scale industrial condition monitoring (CM) data. We choose this unsupervised learning approach to cope with one of the biggest challenges of applying PdM in industry: the lack of labelled failure data. The health prognostics model provides a quantitative measure of degradation given a specific production sequence and thus enables PdM-IPS. The framework is validated both on NASA’s C-MAPSS data set as well as real industrial data from machining centers for automotive component manufacturing. The results indicate that the approach can both capture and quantify changes in machine condition such that PdM-IPS can be subsequently realized.