Cloud-based Collaborative Learning (CCL) for the Automated Condition Monitoring of Wind Farms

Modeling Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) architectures for the automation of wind turbines and farms (WT/F), as well as their condition monitoring (CM) is a growing concept among researchers. Several end-to-end automated cloud-based solutions that digitize CM operations intelligently to reduce manual efforts and costs are being developed. However, establishing robust and secure communication across WT/F is still difficult for the wind energy industry. We propose a fully automated cloud-based collaborative learning (CCL) architecture using the Eclipse Arrowhead Framework and an unsupervised dictionary learning (USDL) CM approach. The scalability of the framework enabled digitization and collaboration across the WT/Fs. Collaborative learning is a novel approach that allows all WT/Fs to learn from each other in real-time. Each turbine has CCL based CM using USDL as micro-services that autonomously perform feature selection and failure prediction to optimize cost, computation, and resources. The fundamental essence of the USDL approach is to enhance the WT/F's learning and accuracy. We use dictionary distances as a metric for analyzing the CM of WT in our proposed USDL approach. A dictionary indicates an anomaly if its distances increased from the dictionary computed at a healthy state of that WT. Using CCL, a WT/F learns all types of failures that could occur in a similar WT/F, predicts any machinery failure, and sends alerts to the technicians to ensure guaranteed proactive maintenance. The results of our research support the notion that when testing a turbine with dictionaries of all the other turbines, every dictionary converges to similar behavior and captures the fault that occurs in that turbine.