Architecture Proposal for Machine Learning Based Industrial Process Monitoring

In the context of Industry 4.0, an emerging trend is to increase the reliability of industrial process by using machine learning (ML) to detect anomalies of production machines. The main advantages of ML are in the ability to (1) capture non-linear phenomena, (2) adapt to many different processes without human intervention and (3) learn incrementally and improve over time. In this paper, we take the perspective of IT system architects and analyse the implications of the inclusion of ML components into a traditional anomaly detection systems. Through a prototype that we deployed for chemical reactors, our findings are that such ML components are impacting drastically the architecture of classical alarm systems. First, there is a need for long-term storage of the data that are used to train the models. Second, the training and usage of ML models can be CPU intensive and may request using specific resources. Third, there is no single algorithm that can detect machine errors. Fourth, human crafted alarm rules can now also include a learning process to improve these rules, for example by using active learning with a human-in-the-loop approach. These reasons are the motivations behind a microservice-based architecture for an alarm system in industrial machinery.