Edge Intelligence for Data Handling and Predictive Maintenance in IIOT

The use of IoT has become pervasive and IoT devices are common in many domains. Industrial IoT (IIoT) utilises IoT devices and sensors to monitor machines and environments to ensure optimal performance of equipment and processes. Predictive Maintenance (PM) which monitors the health of machines to determine the probable failure of components is one IIoT technique which is receiving attention lately. To achieve effective PM, massive amounts of data are collected, processed and ultimately analysed by Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Traditionally IoT sensors transmit their data readings to the cloud for processing and modelling. Handling and transmitting massive amounts of data between IoT devices and infrastructure has a cost. Edge Computing (EC) in which both sensors and intermediate nodes can process data provides opportunities to reduce data transmission costs and increase processing speed. This article examines IIoT for PM and discusses how and where data can be processed and analysed. Initially, this article presents sampling and data reduction techniques. These techniques allow for a reduction in the amount of data transmitted to the cloud for processing but there are potential accuracy trade-offs when ML algorithms utilise reduced datasets. An alternative approach is to move ML algorithms closer to the data to reduce data transmission. There are three main techniques that utilise the EC paradigm to perform ML and data processing on intermediary nodes. These techniques are categorized according to where data processing occurs:
Device and Edge
,
Edge and Cloud
and
Device and Cloud (Federated Learning)
. In addition to exploring traditional approaches, these three state-of-the-art techniques are examined in this article and their benefits and weaknesses are presented. A novel architecture to demonstrate how EC can be utilized both for data reduction and PM in IIoT is also proposed.