Rethinking the Value of Just-in-Time Learning in the Era of Industrial Big Data

Just-in-time learning (JITL) has become a widely used industrial process modeling tool. With the advent of the industrial big data era, rich data information has brought new opportunities to JITL. Specifically, the completeness of data samples in the era of big data provides an important premise and support for the JITL method, prompting us to rethink the application value of JITL in the context of industrial big data. At the same time, the huge amount of data causes certain difficulties in data searching, which is a key issue for JITL. In this article, a parallel computing strategy is adopted to divide the entire computational searching task into several subtasks, and assign the subtasks to parallel computing nodes to complete parallel searching. In this way, not only the full advantage of big data information is effectively utilized, but also the search capability and efficiency under big data are improved. In addition, in order to improve the real-time nature of JITL, a model library management (MLM) strategy is adopted, and the query similar samples are used to operate with existing similar models. And by selectively adding new data, the database management (DBM) strategy is also developed, which not only alleviates the problem of information redundancy, but also reduces the search pressure caused by the increasingly large database. Obviously, MLM and DBM are particularly important as JITL auxiliary tools under industrial big data. Combining parallel computing, a parallel JITL (P-JITL) framework is proposed. As an example, the variational Bayesian factor regression model is transformed into the parallel Bayesian-JITL method for big process data modeling, which is further extended to a nonlinear form. To evaluate the feasibility and efficiency of the developed methods, a real industrial case is demonstrated.