As we enter the 4th Industrial Revolution – what the World Economic Forum describes as “bringing together digital, physical and biological systems” – the machinery that drove the third is beginning to integrate AI technology in order to render manufacturing and maintenance processes more efficient.
Every machine degrades over time. Predictive maintenance (PdM) should be a core process to avoid downtime. Deep learning is a great potential technique to apply to PdM because it’s good at identifying patterns in scenarios involving large, complex datasets containing multiple types of data. In addition, by adding audio or image data to tabular/sensor data, PdM can improve the models on machine or service degradation. In a time when manufacturing companies are under intense pressure to improve efficiency and productivity, every gain is valuable.