Machine Learning for Predictive Diagnostics at the Edge: An IIoT Practical Example

Edge Computing is becoming more and more essential for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for data acquisition from shop floors. The shifting from central (cloud) to distributed (edge nodes) approaches will enhance the capabilities of handling real-time big data from IoT. Furthermore, these paradigms allow moving storage and network resources at the edge of the network closer to IoT devices, thus ensuring low latency, high bandwidth, and location-based awareness. This research aims at developing a reference architecture for data collecting, smart processing, and manufacturing control system in an IIoT environment. In particular, our architecture supports data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, in particular decentralized and distributed hybrid twins, at the edge of the network. In addition, we claim the possibility to have distributed Machine Learning (ML) by enabling edge devices to learn local ML models and to store them at the edge. Furthermore, edges have the possibility of improving the global model (stored at the cloud) by sending the reinforced local models (stored in different shop floors) towards the cloud. In this paper, we describe our architectural proposal and show a predictive diagnostics case study deployed in an edge-enabled IIoT infrastructure. Reported experimental results show the potential advantages of using the proposed approach for dynamic model reinforcement by using real-time data from IoT instead of using an offline approach at the cloud infrastructure.