This study presents a comprehensive multidisciplinary review of autonomous monitoring and analysis of large‐scale photovoltaic (PV) power plants using enabling technologies, namely artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), internet of things (IoT), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and big data analytics (BDA), aiming to automate the entire condition monitoring procedures of PV systems. Autonomous monitoring and analysis is a novel concept for integrating various techniques, devices, systems, and platforms to further enhance the accuracy of PV monitoring, thereby improving the performance, reliability, and service life of PV systems. This review article covers current trends, recent research paths and developments, and future perspectives of autonomous monitoring and analysis for PV power plants. Additionally, this study identifies the main barriers and research routes for the autonomous and smart condition monitoring of PV systems, to address the current and future challenges of enabling the PV terawatt (TW) transition. The holistic review of the literature shows that the field of autonomous monitoring and analysis of PV plants is rapidly growing and is capable to significantly improve the efficiency and reliability of PV systems. It can also have significant benefits for PV plant operators and maintenance staff, such as reducing the downtime and the need for human operators in maintenance tasks, as well as increasing the generated energy.

The reliable operation of monoblock centrifugal pumps (MCP) is crucial in various industrial applications. Achieving optimal performance and minimizing costly downtime requires effectively detecting and diagnosing faults in critical pump components. This study proposes an innovative approach that leverages deep transfer learning techniques. An accelerometer was adopted to capture vibration signals emitted by the pump. These signals are then converted into spectrogram images which serve as the input for a sophisticated classification system based on deep learning. This enables the accurate identification and diagnosis of pump faults. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, 15 pre-trained networks including ResNet-50, InceptionV3, GoogLeNet, DenseNet-201, ShuffleNet, VGG-19, MobileNet-v2, InceptionResNetV2, VGG-16, NasNetmobile, EfficientNetb0, AlexNet, ResNet-18, Xception, ResNet101 and ResNet-18 were employed. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach with AlexNet exhibiting the highest level of accuracy among the pre-trained networks. Additionally, a meticulous evaluation of the execution time of the classification process was performed. AlexNet achieved 100.00% accuracy with an impressive execution (training) time of 17 s. This research provides invaluable insights into applying deep transfer learning for fault detection and diagnosis in MCP. Using pre-trained networks offers an efficient and precise solution for this task. The findings of this study have the potential to significantly enhance the reliability and maintenance practices of MCP in various industrial settings.

The suspension system is of paramount importance in any automobile. Thanks to the suspension system, every journey benefits from pleasant rides, stable driving and precise handling. However, the suspension system is prone to faults that can significantly impact the driving quality of the vehicle. This makes it essential to find and diagnose any faults in the suspension system and rectify them immediately. Numerous techniques have been used to identify and diagnose suspension faults, each with drawbacks. This paper’s proposed suspension fault detection system aims to detect these faults using deep transfer learning techniques instead of the time-consuming and expensive conventional methods. This paper used pre-trained networks such as Alex Net, ResNet-50, Google Net and VGG16 to identify the faults using radar plots of the vibration signals generated by the suspension system in eight cases. The vibration data were acquired using an accelerometer and data acquisition system placed on a test rig for eight different test conditions (seven faulty, one good). The deep learning model with the highest accuracy in identifying and detecting faults among the four models was chosen and adopted to find defects. The results state that VGG16 produced the highest classification accuracy of 96.70%.

This study proposes a vision transformer to detect visual defects on steel surfaces. The proposed approach utilizes an open-source image dataset to classify steel surface conditions into six fault categories namely, crazing, inclusion, rolled in, pitted surface, scratches and patches. The defect images are first subject to resizing and then fed into a vision transformer subject to different hyperparameter configurations to determine the most optimal setting to render highest classification performance. The performance of the model is evaluated for different hyperparameter configurations, and the most optimal configuration is examined using the associated confusion matrices. It was observed that the proposed model presents a high overall accuracy of 96.39 % for detection and classification of steel surface faults. The study presents a descriptive insight into the vision transformer architecture and in addition, compares the performance of the current model with the results of other approaches suggested for application in literature. Vision transformers can serve as standalone approaches and suitable alternatives to the widely used convolution neural networks (CNNs) by actuating complex defect detection and classification tasks in real-time, enabling efficient and robust condition monitoring of a wide range of defects.