A Predictive Maintenance Methodology: Predicting the Time-to-Failure of Machines in Industry 4.0

Predictive maintenance is an essential aspect of the concept of Industry 4.0. In contrast to previous maintenance strategies, which plan repairs based on periodic schedules or threshold values, predictive maintenance is normally based on estimating the time-to-failure of machines. Thus, predictive maintenance enables a more efficient and effective maintenance approach. Although much research has already been done on time-to-failure prediction, most existing works provide only specialized approaches for specific machines. In most cases, these are either rotary machines (i.e., bearings) or lithium-ion batteries. To bridge the gap to a more general time-to-failure prediction, we propose a generic end-to-end predictive maintenance methodology for the time-to-failure prediction of industrial machines. Our methodology exhibits a number of novel aspects including a universally applicable method for feature extraction based on different types of sensor data, well-known feature transformation and selection techniques, adjustable target class assignment based on fault records with three different labeling strategies, and the training of multiple state-of-the-art machine learning classification models including hyperparameter optimization. We evaluated our time-to-failure prediction methodology in a real-world case study consisting of monitoring data gathered over several years from a large industrial press. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed methodology for six different time-to-failure pre-diction windows, as well as for the downscaled binary prediction of impending failures. In this case study, the multi-class feed-forward neural network model achieved the overall best results.