A deep attention based approach for predictive maintenance applications in IoT scenarios

Purpose: The recent innovations of Industry 4.0 have made it possible to easily collect data related to a production environment. In this context, information about industrial equipment – gathered by proper sensors – can be profitably used for supporting predictive maintenance (PdM) through the application of data-driven analytics based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Although deep learning (DL) approaches have proven to be a quite effective solutions to the problem, one of the open research challenges remains – the design of PdM methods that are computationally efficient, and most importantly, applicable in real-world internet of things (IoT) scenarios, where they are required to be executable directly on the limited devices’ hardware. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors propose a DL approach for PdM task, which is based on a particular and very efficient architecture. The major novelty behind the proposed framework is to leverage a multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism to obtain both high results in terms of remaining useful life (RUL) estimation and low memory model storage requirements, providing the basis for a possible implementation directly on the equipment hardware. Findings: The achieved experimental results on the NASA dataset show how the authors’ approach outperforms in terms of effectiveness and efficiency the majority of the most diffused state-of-the-art techniques. Research limitations/implications: A comparison of the spatial and temporal complexity with a typical long-short term memory (LSTM) model and the state-of-the-art approaches was also done on the NASA dataset. Despite the authors’ approach achieving similar effectiveness results with respect to other approaches, it has a significantly smaller number of parameters, a smaller storage volume and lower training time. Practical implications: The proposed approach aims to find a compromise between effectiveness and efficiency, which is crucial in the industrial domain in which it is important to maximize the ...