A Detailed Study on Algorithms for Predictive Maintenance in Smart Manufacturing: Chip Form Classification Using Edge Machine Learning

Industrial and technological evolution has led to the identification of different techniques and strategies that can best adapt to the needs of Manufacturing Industry 4.0. As industrial production has become more automated, the need for more efficient maintenance strategies has increased. Today, among the possible, several applications demonstrate how the Predictive Maintenance (PdM) strategy is the best performing. In fact, PdM makes it possible to predict an impending failure with high accuracy in order to intervene before failure occurs. This work focuses on the application of PdM technique in order to predict the type of chips produced by a lathe through a machine learning algorithm. Moreover, being our application a delay-sensitive one, to drastically decrease the time delay in prediction, our solution proposes the combination of PdM with the Edge Computing paradigm. To simulate this paradigm, the chosen machine learning models were deployed on STM microcontrollers obtaining both high accuracy (98%) and an inference time in the order of milliseconds.