This study aims to reflect on a list of libraries providing decision support to AI models. The goal is to assist in finding suitable libraries that support visual explainability and interpretability of the output of their AI model. Especially in sensitive application areas, such as medicine, this is crucial for understanding the decision-making process and for a safe application. Therefore, we use a glioma classification model’s reasoning as an underlying case. We present a comparison of 11 identified Python libraries that provide an addition to the better known SHAP and LIME libraries for visualizing explainability. The libraries are selected based on certain attributes, such as being implemented in Python, supporting visual analysis, thorough documentation, and active maintenance. We showcase and compare four libraries for global interpretations (ELI5, Dalex, InterpretML, and SHAP) and three libraries for local interpretations (Lime, Dalex, and InterpretML). As use case, we process a combination of openly available data sets on glioma for the task of studying feature importance when classifying the grade II, III, and IV brain tumor subtypes glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), anaplastic astrocytoma (AASTR), and oligodendroglioma (ODG), out of 1276 samples and 252 attributes. The exemplified model confirms known variations and studying local explainability contributes to revealing less known variations as putative biomarkers. The full comparison spreadsheet and implementation examples can be found in the appendix.

Globalization in the field of industry is fostering the need for cognitive production systems. To implement modern concepts that enable tools and systems for such a cognitive production system, several challenges on the shop floor level must first be resolved. This paper discusses the implementation of selected cognitive technologies on a real industrial case-study of a construction machine manufacturer. The partner company works on the concept of mass customization but utilizes manual labour for the high-variety assembly stations or lines. Sensing and guidance devices are used to provide information to the worker and also retrieve and monitor the working, with respecting data privacy policies. Next, a specified process of data contextualization, visual analytics, and causal discovery is used to extract useful information from the retrieved data via sensors. Communications and safety systems are explained further to complete the loop of implementation of cognitive entities on a manual assembly line. This deepened involvement of cognitive technologies are human-centered, rather than automated systems. The explained cognitive technologies enhance human interaction with the processes and ease the production methods. These concepts form a quintessential vision for an effective assembly line. This paper revolutionizes the existing industry 4.0 with an even-intensified human–machine interaction and moving towards cognitivity.

Taking the multi-component perspective in Predictive Maintenance (PdM) is one promising approach to improve prediction quality. Therefore, detection and modeling of interdependencies within systems are important, especially as systems become more complex and personalized. However, existing solutions in PdM mostly focus on a single-component perspective, neglecting the dependencies between components, even if interdependencies can be found between most components in the real world. The major reason for this lost opportunity is the challenge of identifying and modeling interdependencies between components. This paper introduces a framework to identify interdependencies and explain their impact on PdM within a Multi-Component System (MCS). The contribution of this approach is two-fold. First, it shows the impact of modeling interdependencies in predictive analytics. Second, it helps to understand which components interact with each other and to which degree they affect the deterioration state of corresponding components. As a result, our approach can identify and explain the existence of interdependencies within components. In particular, we demonstrate that time from last change of component is a valuable feature to quantify interdependencies. Moreover, we show that taking into account the interdependencies provides a statistically significant improvement of f1-score by 7% on average compared to the model where interdependencies are neglected. We expect that our findings will improve maintenance scheduling in the industry while improving prediction models in general.

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) is one of the most important applications of advanced data science in Industry 4.0, aiming to facilitate manufacturing processes. To build PdM models, sufficient data, such as condition monitoring and maintenance data of the industrial application, are required. However, collecting maintenance data is complex and challenging as it requires human involvement and expertise. Due to time constraints, motivating workers to provide comprehensive labeled data is very challenging, and thus maintenance data are mostly incomplete or even completely missing. In addition to these aspects, a lot of condition monitoring data-sets exist, but only very few labeled small maintenance data-sets can be found. Hence, our proposed solution can provide additional labels and offer new research possibilities for these data-sets. To address this challenge, we introduce MEDEP, a novel maintenance event detection framework based on the Pruned Exact Linear Time (PELT) approach, promising a low false-positive (FP) rate and high accuracy results in general. MEDEP could help to automatically detect performed maintenance events from the deviations in the condition monitoring data. A heuristic method is proposed as an extension to the PELT approach consisting of the following two steps: (1) mean threshold for multivariate time series and (2) distribution threshold analysis based on the complexity-invariant metric. We validate and compare MEDEP on the Microsoft Azure Predictive Maintenance data-set and data from a real-world use case in the welding industry. The experimental outcomes of the proposed approach resulted in a superior performance with an FP rate of around 10% on average and high sensitivity and accuracy results.