The term industrial edge computing is used to describe a distributed platform that integrates communication, computation, and storage resources for performing real-time applications that can be directly accessed from the cloud. A step toward the industrial Internet revolution, industrial edge computing is designed to facilitate agile connectivity, real-time control, and data optimization, while enabling intelligent applications, ensuring tight security, and protecting privacy. Industrial edge computing makes use of what is known as edge computing nodes (ECNs), which bridge the gap between the physical world and the digital world by acting as smart gateways for assets, services, and systems. The IEEE P2805 Standards are being developed for defining protocols for self-management, data acquisition, and machine learning through cloud-edge collaboration on ECNs.

In the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Development and Operations (DevOps) has been proven to deliver reliable, scalable software within a shorter time. Due to the explosion of Machine Learning (ML) applications, the term Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) has gained significant interest among ML practitioners. This paper explains the DevOps and MLOps processes relevant to the implementation of MLOps. The contribution of this paper towards the MLOps framework is threefold: First, we review the state of the art in MLOps by analyzing the related work in MLOps. Second, we present an overview of the leading DevOps principles relevant to MLOps. Third, we derive an MLOps framework from the MLOps theory and apply it to a time-series forecasting application in the hourly day-ahead electricity market. The paper concludes with how MLOps could be generalized and applied to two more use cases with minor changes.

Research, the universal pursuit of new knowledge, is embarking on a fresh journey into artificial intelligence (AI). Nature reports that AI arose nine places to the fourth-most popular search term and that search terms machine learning and deep learning appeared in the top 20 for the first time since 2018. It is pertinent for industrial informatics to embrace this renewed surge of interest in AI with a clear direction and purpose that engages scholars, practitioners, and professionals alike.

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a potentially disruptive technology for control and optimization of HVAC systems. A reinforcement learning agent takes actions, which can be direct HVAC actuator commands or setpoints for control loops in building automation systems. The actions are taken to optimize one or more targets, such as indoor air quality, energy consumption and energy cost. The agent receives feedback from the HVAC systems to quantify how well these targets have been achieved. The feedback is captured by a reward function designed by the developer of the reinforcement learning agent. A few reviews have focused on the reward aspect of reinforcement learning applications for HVAC. However, there is a lack of reviews that assess how the actions of the reinforcement learning agent have been formulated, and how this impacts the possibilities to achieve various optimization targets in single zone or multi-zone buildings. The aim of this review is to identify the action formulations in the literature and to assess how the choice of formulation impacts the level of abstraction at which the HVAC systems are considered. Our methodology involves a search string in the Web of Science database and a list of selection criteria applied to each article in the search results. For each selected article, a three-tier categorization of the selected articles has been performed. Firstly, the applicability of the approach to buildings with one or more zones is considered. Secondly, the articles are categorized by the type of action taken by the agent, such as a binary, discrete or continuous action. Thirdly, the articles are categorized by the aspects of the indoor environment being controlled, namely temperature, humidity or air quality. The main result of the review is this three-tier categorization that reveals the community’s emphasis on specific HVAC applications, as well as the readiness to interface the reinforcement learning solutions to HVAC systems. The article concludes with a discussion of trends in the field as well as challenges that require further research.

Sucker-rod pumping systems are the most widely applied artificial lift equipment in the oil and gas industry. Accurate and intelligent working condition recognition of pumping systems imposes major impacts on oilfield production benefits and efficiency. The shape of dynamometer card reflects the working conditions of sucker-rod pumping systems, and different conditions can be indicated by their typical card characteristics. In traditional identification methods, however, features are manually extracted based on specialist experience and domain knowledge. In this paper, an automatic fault diagnosis method is proposed to recognize the working conditions of sucker-rod pumping systems with massive dynamometer card data collected by sensors. Firstly, AlexNet-based transfer learning is adopted to automatically extract representative features from various dynamometer cards. Secondly, with the extracted features, error-correcting output codes model-based SVM is designed to identify the working conditions and improve the fault diagnosis accuracy and efficiency. The proposed AlexNet-SVM algorithm is validated against a real dataset from an oilfield. The results reveal that the proposed method reduces the need for human labor and improves the recognition accuracy.