Anomaly Detection for Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0- A survey

Maintenance and reliability professionals in the manufacturing industry have the primary goal of improving asset availability. Poor and fewer maintenance strategies can result in lower productivity of machinery. At the same time unplanned downtimes due to frequent maintenance activities can lead to financial loss. This has put organizations’ thought process into a trade-off situation to choose between extending the remaining functional life of the equipment at the risk of taking machine down (run-to-failure) or attempting to improve uptime by carrying out early and periodic replacement of potentially good parts which could have run successfully for a few more cycles. Predictive maintenance (PdM) aims to break these tradeoffs by empowering manufacturers to improve the remaining useful life of their machines and at the same time avoiding unplanned downtime and decreasing planned downtime. Anomaly detection lies at the core of PdM with the primary focus on finding anomalies in the working equipment at early stages and alerting the manufacturing supervisor to carry out maintenance activity. This paper describes the challenges in traditional anomaly detection strategies and propose a novel deep learning technique to predict abnormalities ahead of actual failure of the machinery.