Predictive maintenance (PdM) has the potential to reduce industrial costs by anticipating failures and extending the work life of components. Nowadays, factories are monitoring their assets and most collected data belong to correct working conditions. Thereby, semi-supervised data-driven models are relevant to enable PdM application by learning from assets’ data. However, their main challenges for application in industry are achieving high accuracy on anomaly detection, diagnosis of novel failures, and adaptability to changing environmental and operational conditions (EOC). This article aims to tackle these challenges, experimenting with algorithms in press machine data of a production line. Initially, state-of-the-art and classic data-driven anomaly detection model performance is compared, including 2D autoencoder, null-space, principal component analysis (PCA), one-class support vector machines (OC-SVM), and extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithms. Then, diagnosis tools are developed supported on autoencoder’s latent space feature vector, including clustering and projection algorithms to cluster data of synthetic failure types semi-supervised. In addition, explainable artificial intelligence techniques have enabled to track the autoencoder’s loss with input data to detect anomalous signals. Finally, transfer learning is applied to adapt autoencoders to changing EOC data of the same process. The data-driven techniques used in this work can be adapted to address other industrial use cases, helping stakeholders gain trust and thus promote the adoption of data-driven PdM systems in smart factories.

In this paper, a set of best practice data sharing guidelines for wind turbine fault detection model evaluation is developed, which can help practitioners overcome the main challenges of digitalisation. Digitalisation is one of the key drivers for reducing costs and risks over the whole wind energy project life cycle. One of the largest challenges in successfully implementing digitalisation is the lack of data sharing and collaboration between organisations in the sector. In order to overcome this challenge, a new collaboration framework called WeDoWind was developed in recent work. The main innovation of this framework is the way it creates tangible incentives to motivate and empower different types of people from all over the world to share data and knowledge in practice. In this present paper, the challenges related to comparing and evaluating different SCADA-data-based wind turbine fault detection models are investigated by carrying out a new case study, the “WinJi Gearbox Fault Detection Challenge”, based on the WeDoWind framework. A total of six new solutions were submitted to the challenge, and a comparison and evaluation of the results show that, in general, some of the approaches (Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm for constructing health indicators, performance monitoring using Deep Neural Networks, Combined Ward Hierarchical Clustering and Novelty Detection with Local Outlier Factor and Time-to-failure prediction using Random Forest Regression) appear to exhibit high potential to reach the goals of the Challenge. However, there are a number of concrete things that would have to have been done by the Challenge providers and the Challenge moderators in order to ensure success. This includes enabling access to more details of the different failure types, access to multiple data sets from more wind turbines experiencing gearbox failure, provision of a model or rule relating fault detection times or a remaining useful lifetime to the estimated costs for repairs, replacements and inspections, provision of a clear strategy for training and test periods in advance, as well as provision of a pre-defined template or requirements for the results. These learning outcomes are used directly to define a set of best practice data sharing guidelines for wind turbine fault detection model evaluation. The guidelines can be used by researchers in the sector in order to improve model evaluation and data sharing in the future.

The 4th industrial revolution has connected machines and industrial plants, facilitating process monitoring and the implementation of predictive maintenance (PdM) systems that can save up to 60% of maintenance costs. Nowadays, most PdM research is carried out with expert systems and data-driven algorithms, but it is mainly focused on improving the results of reference simulation data sets. Hence, industrial requirements are not commonly addressed, and there is no guiding methodology for their implementation in real PdM use-cases. The objective of this work is to present a methodology for PdM application in industrial companies by combining data-driven techniques with domain knowledge. It defines sequentially ordered stages, steps and tasks to facilitate the design, development and implementation of PdM systems according to business and process characteristics. It also facilitates the collaboration among the required working profiles and defines deliverables. It is designed in a flexible and iterative way, combining standards, state-of-the-art methodologies and referent works of the field. Finally, the proposed methodology is validated on two use-cases: a bushing testbed and a press machine of the production line. These use-cases aim to facilitate, guide and speed up the implementation of the methodology on other PdM use-cases.

The digital era offers many opportunities to the wind energy industry and research community. Digitalisation is one of the key drivers for reducing costs and risks over the whole wind energy project life cycle. One of the largest challenges in successfully implementing digitalisation is the lack of data sharing and collaboration between organisations in the sector. In order to overcome this challenge, a new collaboration method called WeDoWind was developed in recent work. The main innovation of this method is the way it creates tangible incentives to motivate and empower different types of people from all over the world to actually share data and knowledge in practice. In this present paper, the challenges related to comparing and evaluating different SCADA data based wind turbine fault detection models are investigated by carrying out a new case study, the "WinJi Gearbox Fault Detection Challenge", based on the WeDoWind Method. Six new solutions were submitted to the challenge, and a comparison and evaluation of the results show that, in general, some of the approaches (Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm for constructing health indicators, performance monitoring using Deep Neural Networks, Combined Ward Hierarchical Clustering and Novelty Detection with Local Outlier Factor and Time-to-failure prediction using Random Forest Regression) appear to have a high potential to reach the goals of the Challenge. However, there are a number of concrete things that would have to have been done by the Challenge providers and the Challenge moderators in order to ensure success. This includes enabling access to more details of the different failure types, access to multiple data sets from more wind turbines experiencing gearbox failure, provision of a model or rule relating fault detection times or a remaining useful lifetime to the estimated costs for repairs, replacements and inspections, provision of a clear strategy for training and test periods in advance, as well as provision of a pre-defined template or requirements for the results. These learning outcomes are used directly to define a set of best practice data sharing guidelines for wind turbine fault detection model evaluation. They can be used by the sector in order to improve model evaluation and data sharing in the future.