António R. C. Paiva

Ashutosh Tewari, Antonio R. Paiva

Identifying and mitigating safety risks is paramount in a number of industries. In addition to guidelines and best practices, many industries already have safety management systems (SMSs) designed to monitor and reinforce good safety behaviors. The analytic capabilities to analyze the data acquired through such systems, however, are still lacking in terms of their ability to robustly quantify risks posed by various occupational hazards. Moreover, best practices and modern SMSs are unable to account for dynamically evolving environments/behavioral characteristics commonly found in many industrial settings. This article proposes a method to address these issues by enabling continuous and quantitative assessment of safety risks in a data-driven manner. The backbone of our method is an intuitive hierarchical probabilistic model that explains sparse and noisy safety data collected by a typical SMS. A fully Bayesian approach is developed to calibrate this model from safety data in an online fashion. Thereafter, the calibrated model holds necessary information that serves to characterize risk posed by different safety hazards. Additionally, the proposed model can be leveraged for automated decision making, for instance solving resource allocation problems -- targeted towards risk mitigation -- that are often encountered in resource-constrained industrial environments. The methodology is rigorously validated on a simulated test-bed and its scalability is demonstrated on real data from large maintenance projects at a petrochemical plant.

Haining Zheng, Antonio Paiva

The proliferation of IoT sensors and their deployment in various industries and applications has brought about numerous analysis opportunities in this Big Data era. However, drift of those sensor measurements poses major challenges to automate data analysis and the ability to effectively train and deploy models on a continuous basis. In this paper we study and test several approaches from the literature with regard to their ability to cope with and adapt to sensor drift under realistic conditions. Most of these approaches are recent and thus are representative of the current state-of-the-art. The testing was performed on a publicly available gas sensor dataset exhibiting drift over time. The results show substantial drops in sensing performance due to sensor drift in spite of the approaches. We then discuss several issues identified with current approaches and outline directions for future research to tackle them.

Haining Zheng, Antonio R. Paiva, Chris S. Gurciullo

As Artificial Intelligent (AI) technology advances and increasingly large amounts of data become readily available via various Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) projects, we evaluate the state of the art of predictive maintenance approaches and propose our innovative framework to improve the current practice. The paper first reviews the evolution of reliability modelling technology in the past 90 years and discusses major technologies developed in industry and academia. We then introduce the next generation maintenance framework - Intelligent Maintenance, and discuss its key components. This AI and IIoT based Intelligent Maintenance framework is composed of (1) latest machine learning algorithms including probabilistic reliability modelling with deep learning, (2) real-time data collection, transfer, and storage through wireless smart sensors, (3) Big Data technologies, (4) continuously integration and deployment of machine learning models, (5) mobile device and AR/VR applications for fast and better decision-making in the field. Particularly, we proposed a novel probabilistic deep learning reliability modelling approach and demonstrate it in the Turbofan Engine Degradation Dataset.

Weike Sun, Antonio R. C. Paiva, Peng Xu et al.

In processing and manufacturing industries, there has been a large push to produce higher quality products and ensure maximum efficiency of processes. This requires approaches to effectively detect and resolve disturbances to ensure optimal operations. While the control system can compensate for many types of disturbances, there are changes to the process which it still cannot handle adequately. It is therefore important to further develop monitoring systems to effectively detect and identify those faults such that they can be quickly resolved by operators. In this paper, a novel probabilistic fault detection and identification method is proposed which adopts a newly developed deep learning approach using Bayesian recurrent neural networks~(BRNNs) with variational dropout. The BRNN model is general and can model complex nonlinear dynamics. Moreover, compared to traditional statistic-based data-driven fault detection and identification methods, the proposed BRNN-based method yields uncertainty estimates which allow for simultaneous fault detection of chemical processes, direct fault identification, and fault propagation analysis. The outstanding performance of this method is demonstrated and contrasted to (dynamic) principal component analysis, which are widely applied in the industry, in the benchmark Tennessee Eastman process~(TEP) and a real chemical manufacturing dataset.