An Efficient Siamese Network and Transfer Learning-Based Predictive Maintenance System for More Sustainable Manufacturing

Legacy machinery poses a specific challenge when integrated into modern manufacturing lines. While modern machinery provides swift methods of integration and inbuilt predictive maintenance (PdM), older machines, while physically fully functional, are less attractive to reuse, a specific reason being their lack of ready-to-implement PdM hardware and models. More sustainable manufacturing operations can be achieved if the useable lifespan of functional older machinery can be extended through retrofittable PdM and modern industrial communication systems. While PdM models can be developed for a class (make/model) of machine with retrofitted sensing, it is often found that legacy machines will deviate greatly from their original form, through nonstandard maintenance and component replacement actions during their lengthy lifespan. This would mean that each legacy machine would require a custom PdM model, a cost often leading to the removal or nonusage of legacy machines. This paper proposes a framework designed for the generation of an efficient PdM algorithm which would allow for the reuse of legacy machines retrofitted with low-cost sensing in modern manufacturing for increased sustainability. Given a limited number of data samples collected from a machine to be maintained, we aim to predict a failure or/and maintenance time by making use of the difference between the characteristics of the variation of the healthy and unhealthy data collected from the machine. We measure the healthiness of the machine by using a Siamese network trained with a public dataset and fine-tuned with data samples obtained from machines with similar characteristics. Although we use different training and testing datasets coming from completely different sources, we obtain reasonable results thanks to the proposed technique. The results of simulations and the statistical analysis enable us to devise a transfer learning technique and a Siamese network employed for failure detection in the machine. The proposed system will allow for the continued use of older machines in modern facilities, enabling more sustainable manufacturing models.